Meet Interesting People at Your Local KFC!

Nowerdays, social networking is a big business. There's Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Myspace and countless other sites whose primary goal is making money off people socialising. Then you have dating websites that use the same premise in order to bring people together. Some people call it a social revolution. Other people call it social isolation. This post is for those who fall into the latter category.

Sometimes, it is nice to get out of the house and meet other people face to face. The problem with social networking is you just don't get the same level as crazy as you do in person. Online it is quite easy for someone to hide their mannerisms and, in the case of this particular subject, their eating habits. So, for anyone who wants to meet new people, I say: visit KFC on a week day.

Firstly, lets start with KFC. It is not the usual fast food place of my choice. I have nothing against it, but I have found the food to be a little overpriced in the past and there is only so many ways you can dress up chicken. At the end of the day, if you don't feel like chicken, you aren't going to visit KFC. The other thing that puts me off is the fact that it always feels like KFC are hiding something.

For example, their adverts are as follows:

Hand prepared, fresh chicken. High-standard training. "Cooks". The advert certainly seems to suggest that each KFC has a massive, open, bustling kitchen in the back with chefs and high standards of cleanliness and food quality. I'm not suggesting that they are lying, but it just doesn't feel like that is the atmosphere when you glean a look into the staff areas of the restaurants. In addition to this, they seem to forget that it is a fast food place. I just can't imagine fast food being produced with quite the same calmness as on the above advert.

Instead, I imagine a rushed kitchen with people swearing at each other and an oven that vomits out chicken faster than they can put it in buckets to serve to people. It's the kind of place where chicken that looks suspiciously like brains occasionally finds itself the menu.

But I digress, KFC is not my first place of choice for food but as I was awaiting my bike to be fixed, I sat in there and I decided to get something to eat and take in my surroundings. Whilst there, I met the following people:

Spherical Man:

I first spotted this man when I was half way through my chicken wrap. In fairness, he was not hard to miss. He was a very large gentleman -- definitely morbidly obese -- and he was dressed in a massive dark t-shirt and baggy tracksuit bottoms. At first glance, he was just a generic fat guy. But then, when he briefly got up to get some napkins, I realised something spectacular.

He was a perfect sphere. Even his back was somehow rounded. If he had fallen over, he almost certainly would've rolled and would've struggled to get back onto his feet. If he wore a t-shirt with a world map on it, you could easily plan your next holiday on him. I text a friend at the time and stated that I would've happily gone up to him and told him that he was, for all intents and purposes, geometrically perfect. I am a thorough believer that everyone should be happy in their own skin and I thought it would be a nice sentiment to share with him.

Then he ate the bones.

He made his way back to his seat -- as geometrically perfect from the back as he was from the front -- and sat down. He had a little bit of his family banquet left so I thought he was going to wrap the chicken bones he had left in the napkins but instead he wiped his face and ate the goddamn bones. He chewed the cartilage from the end of the leg joints and there was a distinctive splitting sound as he took massive bites from the bones themselves. Like a hyena. I guess such geometry comes at a price.

Even he wouldn't eat at KFC

Straw Women:

This lady was a fleeting 'customer'. After watching spherical man munch his way through his family banquet like something from Animal Planet, a thin, middle-aged lady walked into the restaurant wearing clothes that looked suspiciously like ones she may have worn on a night out. She didn't join the queue at the counter to order food, she simply walked straight to the straw dispenser and took literally about 50 plastic straws out, crammed them into her handbag and then walked straight out of the building. Not exactly normal. Unless she does catering, I can only assume she is constructing something massive from the straws she grabbed. The fact that she went straight to the dispenser, despite it being out of the view of the door, also implies she has done that particular act at least once before.

Staring Kid:

This child made me uncomfortable. Children like to stare, it is an unfortunate side effect of a young persons curiosity. They want to look at unusual things, unusual people and unusual clothes and then usually go on to ask unusual questions that make their parents feel uncomfortable. This child was not like that. I don't consider myself to look particularly unique and I wasn't dressed particularly strange on the day I visited KFC. I certainly was not the most unusual person in the building at the time. Despite that, this young boy insisted on sitting there staring. The whole time, he just sat there and stared at me from the table directly to my right. He didn't even stop to look at his food, he just sat there and stared.

I actually thought for a while that he may have been blind because his gaze never left me but he walked unaided and gave no other signs of blindness. His mother didn't even seem to think it was unusual. She looked at him, briefly looked to me and then looked indifferent to the whole affair. I managed to spill ice down my front during my boredom and I thought that perhaps the child might laugh or break his gaze for a moment to whisper to his sister, but no. No emotions. No movement. No conversation. Just the staring.

He will either become a Christian missionary or a serial killer. Or both. Fact.

Chicken Decimator:

This was a young guy who came in and looked like a college student. I thought he was going to sit with some other students who had made their way in earlier and were chatting on the table in front of me. Instead, he ordered a box of chicken and sat on his own. There was nothing immediately unusual about him, but the reason he caught my eye was because of the way he ate.

I realise watching people eat probably qualifies me to be in this list of strangeness but I must add that boredom does bad things to me and I would not usually take such notice in the way people act, let alone eat. This was different. When he sat down and started, I realised that he was doing it wrong. I don't know how you can fail to eat, but he was managing it just fine. He would dissect the chicken; pull the skin from the flesh, pull the flesh into bits and then take the bones out. He then put the bones and the skin (with all the breadcrumb batter) back into the box and pushed the meat aside. I was convinced at this point that he would eat the meat and he was just a health nut but instead he seemed to pull the meat apart and systematically drop it back into the box. I swear, I saw him eat about five tiny pieces and then put the rest away.

And he did that with all of his chicken.

Either he was an android, or a medical student, or he had just come into the building for the atmosphere.

The Food Critics:

When I first arrived at KFC, there was about 4 people in the queue ahead of me. The two directly in front were in their 60's and did look somewhat out of place in a KFC. They were quite well dressed (compared to everyone else) and they spoke the queens English. That is to say, they were posh. Posh people need food too, so it's not all that unusual that they were in the restaurant. It was their mannerisms that were unusual.

For example, when they were queuing they were surveying the menu, talking about each dish and stating what they did or didn't like about it. "Oh Gerald, you don't like the fiery wings, they gave you a bad stomach last time". "Shall we have one of the burgers?" "They're not real burgers Cheryl, they only sell chicken here." After talking about the dish, they commented on the prices and when they finally got round to ordering they asked for an ingredients form. I half expected them to ask to meet the 'chef'.

They then sat down at a table and looked a little disappointed that there were no knives and forks available. The most surprising thing was that when they finished their meals, they actually looked rather happy and before leaving they walked to the counter (whilst other people were ordering) and thanked the staff for the lovely meal. I consider myself a nice person, but they made me feel pretty mean.

Still, I bet they wrote a scathing review of the place.

This is Colonel Sanders.

So, if you ever feel the need to meet new, interesting (and probably single) people then simply visit your nearest KFC and bask in the awesomeness of battered chicken of questionable quality.