Wing Man

Well, what better time than 3 am to discuss chicken wings?

Here's my contribution to the evils of the service industry.

I put myself through nursing school, with the help of the GI Bill, working at a "Mini Mart". I started in the Deli there. We had the typical small town deli crap. The "specialty" was broasted chicken and potato's.
I spent what feels like a lifetime cleaning chicken, and flouring it, and dumping it into a vat of hot oil to serve the citizens of my tiny town. They couldn't get enough of the oil filled crapola.
A basket of chicken takes 8 minutes to broast. After 12 years I still know this to be true.
I had some regular customers that came to visit me on a regular basis. One of them was this little, old, effeminate man. He was obviously, and confirmed by his own verbalization, a gay gentleman.
He liked wings.
If the wings I had in the heating window were on the elderly side, I'd make him up a new batch. If your just chucking wings in the big hot vat o' fat, it doesn't take eight minutes. Just a couple, and he'd wait.
Well, one fateful day, this little guy showed up, and I had just dumped in a vat of chicken. I'd done wings, themselves, less than a half hour before. I told him this, and offered him the wings that I had.
He had a stinking, loud obnoxious FIT. Practically foaming at the mouth. Yelling to beat the band, spit flying, crazed. Over wings.
Then he made the fatal mistake of calling me a bitch. And a "teen Queen". (I was 25 years old.). And demanded to see the manager.
oooookay.
It was evening, the manager was at home. So one of the cashiers came over to see what the hullaballoo was about. He proceeded to go crazed old man without wings on her, too. Insulting us both. Accusing me of holding out on him.
By this time, of course, my chicken had cooked, but there was no way in hell I was going to placate the old dude who'd called me a "teen queen" (bitch, surprisingly, I can live with, sometimes.). Eventually he insulted the cashier enough that she tossed him from the store all together. Over chicken wings.
Months went by, and the old guy never returned. Then, one evening, there he was. "Oh, grand" I thought to myself, trying to calculate the age of the dessicated wings I had in the window.
To my surprise, hat in hand, the old coot apologized to me. He'd been having a bad day. His loved one had died. And I, I was the innocent bystander that he could unleash all his hurt, and anger, and frustration on. I could be the "teen Queen". I could be the mean, mean deli worker who with held his wings. Of course, I accepted his apology, and, if I remember correctly, I made him fresh wings.