Android Blues posted:

You want to hear about the worst case of my career? Fine, but it's not pretty.

We had a lead on this guy who would do all kinds of sick poo poo with people's burgers. Not unusual, right? But his thing was the charge he got from working in a position of trust. He would get himself hired on at an inconspicuous grill shack, and then he would mix mayo into the relish and put up a handcrafted promotional poster he'd made advertising 'Special Dip', spread on your burger, free of charge. He fed it to whoever would cough up a note. He didn't even make off with the money. Left it in the till, he was a great salesman - you can see it on the security camera footage. Got the upsell on upwards of 90% of orders, way better than even trained Burger King staff, who by the way set the standard for the industry. Said it was a secret recipe. Charmed the ladies, impressed the men. One time, God help me, he finished up a spree through a series of Midwestern Five Guys by topping upwards of fifty patties with peanut butter.

What we later found out was that this guy had an extensive background in graphic design, he was a genius of graphic design, like he had studied at a Swiss conservatory and people thought he was the talent of his generation. He was using his talent to make those chintzy promotional posters. You didn't hear it from me, but McDonald's still uses adaptations of some of those posters in their brand literature today. He died in our final chase, and there's no intellectual property rights for a man who leaves no estate...but I'm getting ahead in the story.

What it did mostly was make me think that some of these psychos might be smart enough to know something we don't. That it's all pointless. That the pounded and pulped reformed meat sandwiches we base our entire legal system and ostensible culture around are just a big, fat joke. Called him the Tin Man, because as far as we could tell, this was a guy with no heart, no soul, no conscience, at least as far as burgers were involved, which was of course the only aspect of his moral profile we were interested in. FBI profilers typified him as a "burger sociopath". I wanted to put him in burger jail so bad, but before I can get to that part of the story, I have to tell you about the time he set himself up behind the counter at our hometown Whataburger - and fed a Marshmallow Fluff patty to my wife.