Make a run for the Border

As I sit here eating my very late lunch of Taco Bell (which I shouldn't be eating, because it's bad for me, and their large Pepsi could keep me in soda for an entire week), I pause to think. We have a history, Taco Bell and I. When I was a child, probably about 11 or 12 years old, spending summers in Wichita with my dad, my little sister and I would often walk to the park or the pool, and on the way home we would stop at a Taco Bell that was near the park. This is my first real recollection of eating there. I'd always order a mexican pizza, and I think she just got nachos (but I never really paid attention to what she ate unless she was eating really slowly and I was in a hurry. That happened more than it should have). As a teenager, the only thing I would eat from the entire menu was chicken soft tacos. Ever. And any menu item with sour cream was gross.

Then, during my junior year in college, I wanted to move off-campus. That meant I had to get a job to pay for rent. So I applied at Taco Bell (well, I applied lots of places but they're the only ones who called me back). I worked the night shift, which was usually 9pm-2am. I got stuck on drive-through duty, which meant that I was not only the cashier, but the dishwasher and the stocker and the sour-cream-dispenser filler.

At first I was really grossed out by the sour cream. I don't know why. I love dairy foods - and basically sour cream is just yogurt without the sweet part. Anyway, one night I was squeezing the SC out of the plastic bag it comes in (they use a contraption kind of like a giant caulking gun to put it on the food) and I was down to the last bits in the last bag, when the side of the bag popped and some of the SC got on my hand. I looked at it for a few seconds, and then got the urge to eat it. Nobody was looking. So I did. And you know? It wasn't bad. What was I grossed out about? After that, I put sour cream on just about every food item at Taco Bell. They used to have this awesome burrito-type thing that had tater tots in it. Steak and the usual taco stuff, and tater tots. It was AWESOME. I miss it. One good thing (probably the ONLY good thing) about that job was that after the store closed, we could eat the leftover food, so I could put 10 tater tots on my burrito, where everyone else only got three, and a bunch of sour cream.

Stay tuned for our next exciting chapter in the Taco Bell saga... "Cracked Hands and Drunk College Guys (or How I Got Fired)".