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