When You Pull the Chili’s Finger

Sometimes fast-food restaurants go too far when they expand their menus. Call me conservative, but what’s wrong with burgers and fries? McDonalds added salads shakers (guess they’re a bit nervous). Burger King added some breakfast sandwich which shares the size and nutritional value of a deep-fried walrus. And to one-up them both, Wendy’s goes and introduces human fingers in their already stellar chili. When will it stop?

By now, you’ve probably heard the story of Anna Ayala. The poor woman just wanted some lunch minus human body parts just like any of us. But it was not to be. In between spoonfuls, it seemed her chili was pointing off to her left. She looked where the chili indicated but saw nothing of consequence. The confusion eventually turned into disgust when she remembered chili is normally a finger-free food. In the true American spirit, she prepared a lawsuit against Wendy’s for the traumatic experience.

If only the story ended there. At the Wendy’s store, during the daily high-five a thon to raise morale, managers noticed that all their employees (except Captain Hook-Hand of course) had all ten fingers. The chili-makers downtown noted the same at their weekly itsy-bitsy spider race. Something was wrong. Where did this well-manicured, 1.5 inch long finger come from?

Investigators were on the case. Then it came to light that poor Anna Ayala had a history of lawsuits against such mega-corporations as General Motors and (I’m not making this one up) El Pollo Loco. The investigations led to the arrest of Anna, as it seems her finger-find was finger-fraud.

But the real interesting part of the story is how people reacted when they first heard about it. So many people said, “I’m not ever eating at Wendy’s again”, "I'm going vegetarian", or “Fetch me my barf bucket”. But now we see Wendy’s isn’t even at fault. People often times perceive things incorrectly. Take the famous song penned by Bruce Springsteen, “Blinded by the Light”. Thousands of people know this song but only a select few know the lyrics.

The real chorus of the song is:
Blinded by the light,
Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night.

When lyrics don’t really make sense, it’s understandable that people won’t get it right. If I sang a song very clearly but said gibberish (i.e. -to the same tune- Hungry like a train, spaced out like a moose, another bullet in the brain) you would not be able to sing it back…unless I had written it down, and you re-read it…

Anyway to prove my point, I went to a Web site where people submit what lyrics sound like to them and ask for the correct lyrics because not knowing drives them crazy. Here are some REAL submissions:

Blinded by the light,
Wrapped up like a noose into the rhythm of the night

Blinded by the light,
Picked up in a bar by the ruler of the night

Blinded by the light,
Wrapped up by Venusians in the middle of the night

And my personal favorite…

Blinded by the light
Held up like a loofah by the foreman of the night.

“Foreman of the Night” is my favorite song in Phantom of the Opera. Anyway, the point is….um….I don’t know what it is. ...oh yeah, before you jump to an assumption and boycott an innocent restaurant chain, remember that it’s “Blinded by the Light; revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night.”