Pan(dem)ic in the Food Court

Chuckle #493 | November 14th, 2012

 scroll down to leave a comment 

Welcome to the Food Court, America’s petri dish!  This is where the huddled masses go when their weary legs just can’t endure another minute of holiday shopping.  And this is why the CDC ranks ‘mall food court’ number 5 on its list of most contagious places to loiter.

Think about it.  Do you ever walk into the food court and say to your kids, “Wow, this place is so clean, what is that fresh, Febreze-like smell?”  No.  You say “get your food and don’t touch anything until mom decontaminates a table with her handy-dandy travel pack of Clorox bleach wipes.” 

Maybe I’m a tiny bit OCD, but I’ve always cleaned my table off after enjoying a delightful food court repast. Very few other people seem to share this compulsion.  I’d like to see these people punished.  For starters, mall security could force feed them Carvel products until their tonsils freeze.

If that sounds a little sadistic, perhaps you haven’t heard that the Bubonic Plague is back and some kind of mouse-born mega-virus is killing people out west.  Seriously, you just can’t make this stuff up.   

I find it totally conceivable that a deadly virus could survive for months on a food court table; growing and mutating until MY FAMILY sits down to enjoy our soggy eggroll and tasteless fried rice combo.

Lucky for us, most malls employ an army of highly motivated, 17 year old minimum wage employees whose job description includes cleaning the tables in the food court.  Yea!  And get this; they are even trained to wash their hands after urinating!  With soap!

Unfortunately, these dermatologically challenged youths are hard to pin down. Helping a middle aged mom does nothing for their street cred.  Getting their attention is the hard part.  “Excuse me buddy,” I say while waving frantically and shamelessly parading my scantily clad teenage daughter up and down the aisles like the main attraction in an Amsterdam brothel. “A little help with a table?” I say, leering.

He sighs. He rolls his eyes.  I totally understand.  Working at the mall food court probably isn’t his dream job.  But eating at the Mall isn’t my dream meal either, and life is all about making compromises.  Like not having a hot fudge sundae for lunch for example.

Our hero pulls a dripping gray rag out of a mystery bucket near the trash cans.  Gasp!  Call an archaeologist!  Carbon dating might place this rag in the Red Tent with Leah.

I can only hope that the murky mystery bucket contains pure bleach.

This young man turns out to be surprisingly industrious.  Perhaps it is because I am with two adorably bored teenage girls who have not yet thanked me for taking them to the mall and probably never will?  He swipes away, smearing the ketchup from one table over the ice cream on another table, then on to the table where some desperate mom let her kids experiment with piles of sugar, salt and spit.

This is either a Paula Dean recipe or the fermenting base for the next H1N1.  The bad news is that because of the weak dollar, American malls are filled with voracious foreign shoppers eating chicken nuggets, licking their fingers, and touching the tables.  Then they fly home.  This has catastrophic pandemic written all over it.

All I wanted to do was pick up a few gifts for the grandparents.  And is it just me or is the General Tso’s Chicken looking a little off today?  

---------------------------------------------------------------

Get Your Weekly Chuckle via email at www.laughoutloudmom.com

Copyright 2008-2012, all rights reserved, LOLmom.com, Greenwich CT

My Dog is Undecided

Chuckle #492 | November 6th, 2012

 scroll down to leave a comment 

Pundits never stop yakking about election bellwethers, but not a single one of them has mentioned the dogs.  Pets are a reflection of their owner’s needs and desires.  Isn’t that the reason why, over time, people start to resemble their dogs?  The relationship between man and dog is especially close and often weird. 

And now it’s become political.

When my dog first peed on a Romney/Ryan lawn sign, I glanced furtively around to make sure no one was watching.  I was worried that folks would boo and jeer and make rude gestures, and maybe even shoot me.  After all, I live in the most Republican town in all New England.  Gun ownership is high and, given a sympathetic judge, that ‘deer at dusk’ defense will work every time.

But then I started to think about what makes a dog pee on some things and not on others.  Was my dog showing approval or disdain by ‘marking’ the Republican sign? Was he pro-Mitt or anti-Mitt?

Hmmmm.  An intriguing question.

 

So I set out to find a neighborhood Democrat with big enough maracas to put an Obama/Biden sign up on the most sacred of all turf, their own front lawn.  We walked and walked.  I became tired.  The dog became tired.  I started to worry that, statistically speaking, the distance travelled could affect the validity of the experiment.

By that time, my dog had already peed on five hapless branches, three hydrants and another dog.  Would he have any pee left, and if so, how would he choose to use it?

 

I realized that Quinnipiac or CNN would have to undertake this study at a later date in a more controlled environment, but for now, I really wanted to see what would happen if and when we found an Obama sign. 

And lo and behold, three miles later, there it was!  We hurried over. He sniffed, he circled, and then…he lifted! Only a few drops came out, but that says something doesn’t it?  Something important I’d like to think.

Either my dog just likes to pee on stuff that sits enticingly close to the road, or my dog is …UNDECIDED! 

This is a really big discovery.  Given the close relationship between man and dog, the chances are pretty high that an undecided voter could be influenced by his dog.  As we all know, the Ohio ‘undecideds’ will choose our next president.  How many of them own dogs?  Are these dogs influential enough to gain a proxy vote?  What is the partisan breakdown of lawn signs in the most critical, contested areas?

Which candidate has (I just can’t resist), a ‘leg up’ over the other?

Given this momentous, breaking news, how should the campaigns react?  For starters, I recommend that Barack and Mitt stop wasting their time kissing babies in down and out diners, and start handing out milkbones, because this election has gone to the dogs. 

An undecided voter is genuinely confused.  All they want is a ‘sign’ to point them in the right direction.  Like religion, it doesn’t have to make sense.  So why wouldn’t they look to man’s best friend for a voting cue?

If you’re looking for a ‘sign’ of where this election is headed, forget about the fancy polls, they are way too scientific.

Watch the neighborhood dogs.  Or better yet, take yours for a walk.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Get your Weekly Chuckle via email at www.laughoutloudmom.com
Copyright 2012, LOLmom.com, Greenwich CT