can't even do nothing properly

One day dad went into McDonald's for a burger but it was quite busy and he had to wait in line. Also, the teenage staff weren't very efficient: one was flirting with a boy from her school, another was talking on her mobile, and another was just plain slow and useless full stop. Dad got more and more impatient. He had a terrible hangover and all he wanted was a nice greasy burger to throw to the pain in his gut.

Finally, he got to the head of the queue and grumpily placed his order but was told it wasn't ready and could he wait two minutes. That got him steaming mad. Even worse, when the burger came, they forgot to put the fries in the bag so when Dad got to the car and looked in the bag---no fries. That really got him totally enraged so he stormed back in the restaurant, demanded to see the manager, shouted and screamed and made a terrible fuss.

The manager, a youngster in his early twenties, was very polite and tried to calm Dad down, even gave him the money back. But the rage was on Dad big time, there was no reasoning with him, and with little drops of spittle flying through the air, he shouted at the manager, "useless bunch of wankers, can't even serve customers properly, can't even pack a bag up properly! Can't even do up an order properly! Can't even do nothing properly!"

And with that he threw the paper bag containing the offending burger at the manager, except that with the red veil of rage upon him, Dad was shaking so much the bag slipped out of his hands and feel to the floor. Then Dad turned around and stormed out of the restaurant and never went back.

In the car he realised that in fact he hadn't ordered or even paid for the fries. So it was all his fault, and he felt bad about that but didn't do anything about it. The girl who had served him was fired a couple days later, not just for the one incident but for a whole lot of things of which the disaster with Dad was just the last straw from management's point of view.

Being fired from McDonald's was the start of a whole series of unfortunate developments for her, which ultimately culminated in her becoming an unemployed, unemployable whore, addicted to crystal meth (ice), getting bashed up nightly and fucked up daily. She blamed Dad for all her woes, and became more and more bitter and more and more irrational about the afternoon she was fired from her job at McDonald's for not being able to pack up a bag properly. Over the course of a number of years living rough on the street, dwelling over what might have been, she formulated a plan for revenge--throw hydrochloric acid into Dad's face. One of her backstreet johns had told her of an horrific case in which two standover men threw hydrochloric acid into a man's face, who then lived his last two weeks in agony before death mercifully came to him.

I don't know how she tracked Dad down, or where she got the acid from, but one sunny Sunday afternoon she and one of her homeless ice-buddies walked into the front yard where Dad was sitting on his outside chair getting some rays on his wrinkled old face. She walked up to Dad, who did not recognise her with all the scabs and scars, the black rings under her eyes, the premature aging, and all the rest of the ice-induced damage.

She was shaking badly, sweating heavily. She was excited and frightened at the same time to be on the verge of getting her revenge on the man who had ruined her life. Then she tried to carry out her plan, which was to throw acid into Dad's face, but the bottle slipped out of her hand and fell to the ground nowhere even near Dad.

He stood up, looked her in the eye, and shouted, "Fuckin' loser! Can't even acid a face properly!" And then he called the police on his mobile.

Copyright © S R Schwarz 2007. All rights reserved.

home (refresh screen)