Here’s a moral dilemma for you: you’ve adamantly sworn yourself off all consumables which are deep-fried, pre-packaged, chocolate-smothered, icecream-centred, caramelicious, take less than two minutes to prepare, or have been proffered up by a suspicious-looking clown who assures you that his special sauce is nothing to worry about.

Then a mysterious, faceless organisation sends you rather promising emails, offering something called an ‘evoucher’ in exchange for consumption of food with such unhealthy worth to your body, it’s campaigning for an extension of the healthy eating food pyramid to accommodate it.

Recently I signed my life away to a website which revolves around performing consumer evaluations for companies. The concept is that you punch in your local postcode into the website, then periodically you’re contacted with requests to visit local stores, bars or restaurants. You fill out a questionnaire on the service and/or goods received, then are compensated for your time and money with a gift.

That’s the concept on paper, anyway. In actuality, you’re just required to visit greasy fast food haunts and force menu items down your throat you’d never order under sane circumstances. Yessir, it’s time to face your greatest fear: delicately pincering a processed fishburger between your fingers as it eyes you up like a cheap hooker riddled with all manner of communicable diseases. Seductively, it releases a glop of mayonnaise into your lap - its mating call. Choking back both tears and nausea, a single helpless salty tear dribbles down your cheek as you curse your new-found lowliness.

You are Hamburger Whore.

I received my first assignment offers approximately three weeks ago. Some local Hungry Jacks (that’s the Australianised Burger King for you foreigners - cease your scoffing now!) outlets wanted to test the service and food quality of their stores on a Friday evening. There were three stores in my area who needed assignments completed, and were offering $20 ‘evouchers’ for every assignment completed. Suspicious of anything that begins with a lower-case E in this day and age, I checked the evoucher website for details and it appeared that it was some sort of ’supervoucher’, valid at a number of retail chains. I decided that I could reward myself with some literature in exchange for twenty-four hours of rumbling bowel torture and accepted all three assignment offers.

As the confirmation emails rolled back, I realised that all three assignments had to be completed within a ninety minute window. During my stoner years, I could easily have accomplished such a consumptionary challenge; but I was masquerading as a healthy person lately. It appeared that I had to order a Whopper meal deal at each outlet, and I couldn’t get away with ordering anything else; because they checked your order time against the cash registers at the store before you received your evoucher.

Desperately ringing all friends I knew, nobody wanted to accompany me into the horrifying depths of hamburger madness. Shrugging, I decided I’d clench my teeth and ride it out on my own.

Ordering a meal at the first restaurant location, I pulled out my printed questionnaire and began noting on it in secret, fully aware that no staff members were permitted to know what I was doing. At first I felt rather grown up and somewhat like an author writing a novel in a coffee shop, until the overpowering retchiness of the hamburger sauce began affecting me. Answering each question in turn on my paper, I sketched details of how long I had to wait in line, how clean the restaurant was, how warm my food was. A worker spilt a cup of Coke on the floor but didn’t clean it up for five minutes - penalty for you, I chuckled evilly, furiously scribbling down the details.

Snapping shut my notebook, I exited the restaurant somewhat triumphantly, but rather satisfied hunger-wise. The next restaurant was a twenty minute walk down the road - I attempted to walk my meal off, but was somewhat vomitious upon my arrival after all the moving around.

Trying vainly to keep the promise of a $60 voucher at the front of my mind, I banged my fist on the desk in front of the cashier and demanded another Whopper meal. As the previous hamburger wormed its way into my stomach, I began feeling irritable and grumpy and almost told the woman that I wasn’t impressed with her lack of light makeup - and where was her goddamn nametag?

Eyes teary, I pushed pieces of bland food into my mouth and duly noted down answers which, after having answered them twenty minutes previously, were no longer exciting at all. Leaving my meal half finished, I stood up and marched out the door. As I began a race against time to reach the last store on my list before my time limit was up, I developed a cramp from the cola which was now loosely wallowing in my belly; causing my stomach to become some sort of horrifying fast-food washing machine.

Arriving at the final store, the staff member openly scowled at me and took twice as long to retrieve my food as the last two stores combined. Fuming, I snatched my meal away from him and squeezed myself into the only available table at the store. Opposite me, a porky man devoured his three double cheeseburgers in a panic.

Deciding that I was pretty pissed off with the whole thing, I let fly on the questionnaire. ‘Toilet contained telltale signs of dihorrea inside bowl,’ I scribbled. ‘Staff misbehaving behind deepfriers,’ I continued. After pausing for a moment and taking a delicate bite of my Whopper, I continued, ‘Hamburger sauce tasted like congealed semen - and given my sexual preference, I goddamn well know what congealed semen tastes like.’

The young man who’d served me my meal walked past and sneered at me. Incensed, I immediately made an addition: ‘Staff should realise their job titles state that they must go about their work and not look like they are being anally raped.’

Satisfied with my notations, I stood up and marched home to submit the report. Following that, experimentations with bulimia were not entirely out of the question, either.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2001 at 7:50 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.