This one's a little complicated, folks, so pay attention.

Ready?

Okay.

So this chick totally orders chicken nuggets, right? But get this — one of them's like a friggin' chicken head. And she totally almost eats it!

If you've ever worked in a fast food restaurant, the first thing you learn is how to get high behind the garbage bin in the back, then get your co-workers laughing by deep frying all the kid's meal toys.

But the second thing you learn — the thing that's drummed into your head the second you put on that dorky apron and visor — is that the customer is always right. No matter how obscenely fat and stupid they are, no matter how many superfluous chromosomes they have, no matter how wrong they are, they're still right.

Mind you, it's not for the same reason the patrons at a classy upscale steakhouse buying $70 platters and $100 bottles of wine are always right. In that case it's more because of the Capitalist assumption that anybody who can drop $300 on one meal is probably either in the habit of being right about things or owns the biggest lucky money tree in Dumb-Ass Forest.  Either way, you have to say they're right or else they'll foreclose on your home and sell your family into servanthood.

But a fast food restaurant basically works on the same principal as Richard Pryor's penny scam from Superman III.  That is, volume.  They make profit by pushing literally Metric Tons of dirt-cheap hamburger-shaped dog food to the vast herds of customers who squeeze in the door.  Here, the customer is always right simply because nothing being sold is worth arguing over.  It would be like fighting over lint at a laundromat. 

Pretend you're the manager of Big Grease Burger Champ, and you're trying to explain to a 19-year-old employee with Down's Syndrome how to unplug a toilet. At the same time you're also yelling at some punk kids to stop dicking around with the ketchup dispenser, yelling at your senior citizen cashier to stop picking his nose in front of customers, and yelling at the three Hispanics who can't speak English not to play "Grab The Nickel From the Bottom" with the deep fryers.

Suddenly Joanna-May Burgertard drags her girth up to the counter and focuses a solid beam of angry stupid at you. She insists she was only given five Chicky Chunks instead of six, even though an idiot-proof machine dispenses them in the back if you mash a large button in the center of a wall. All tolled, she paid $4.69 for the food it cost you $.19 to prepare. You give her another Chicky Chunk and apologize profusely, then run to the back just in time to stop Greg from giving Danielle a kick-ass Slipknot tattoo with a hot grill ladle.

That is not to say, however, that the burger conglomerates assume truth behind every "there's a boar tusk in my Pork Melt" claim.  The customer, in their eyes, can always be "right" while also always being stench-laden mentally handicapped liars.

Once word got out that the customer was always right at stores that serve trash (pick your interpretation), it didn't take very long for people to realize that if they complained loud enough about anything — "My burger had a band aid in it!" "I found a cigarette butt in my fries!" "My sandwich was just this old boot! Give me a sandwich, narc!" — fast food restaurants were happy to give them things, in exchange for their agreement to go be idiots somewhere else and take their clouds of urine-scented air with them.

As with any system in place that rewards selfishness and idiocy with free food, it would seemingly be impossible for people to abuse it. And yet oddly, this is precisely what happened. Back at their tents and tire-forts, white trash families got together and brainstormed into the night. This might not seem like a lot of mental wattage, but keep in mind the average headcount for a family living below the poverty line is something like 15 (so they can eat one if they need to and not miss it, presumably).

The logic was flawless, sort of. In essence, if a) the customer is always right, and b) a minor error results in a minor reward, then... c) we should hide a chicken head in our food! DUDE!

Or something like that. The upshot, anyway, is one of the most prevalent urban legends alive today: someone orders something, usually eats some of it first, then discovers to their horror that they were eating... a deep-fried rat! Or a chicken head! A Cockroach? Something disgusting, anyway! They sue for millions and live in absolute luxury for life.

The most realistic of them was the chicken head, in that it had a photo and everything. And as we all well know, live chickens, bread crumbs and oil do not exist outside the fast food restaurants of America without the strictest of licensing.