by Joe Azar

    I don’t really like the spotlight. If it was really up to me, the only time I would be in front of a camera is when I’m telling an audience who’s my pick for the Broncos game on Sunday. Other than that, I’d prefer to sit in the back row in a classroom, keep my mouth shut and cook a nice steak while watching “The Office” on a Saturday night rather than go out.

     Life has a funny way of showing you the middle finger though, and more often than not, my social awkwardness leads to my face being front and center in a situation less than ideal. If you ask my friends they’d be happy to tell you these occur more times than I’d like to admit.

    Hence why I’ve been asked to talk about my life and the events I’d like to forget but everyone I’ve told always reminds me about. My name is “Bad Luck Joe,” welcome to my diary of sadness.

   It’s fitting to begin with my job at Chick-Fil-A. The gig wasn’t bad, outside of saying “my pleasure” so often during an eight hour shift that to this day my eye twitches when I hear those words. Unlike other fast-food joints like McDonald’s or Wendy’s, Chick-Fil-A likes to pretend that they aren’t a restaurant that serves pre-cooked meat by priding itself in customer service and making each guest’s experience the equivalent to that of Disneyland.

    Need 17 sauces for your eight nuggets? Sure, why not! Is that spicy chicken sandwich too spicy for you? Don’t fret, we’ll take off the exact amount of peppers your spoiled ass wants in order to make it the best sandwich you’ll ever have!

    Coincidentally, the restaurant I worked in was next to a hospital too. The reason this is important is because if a customer walked in with a colored wristband, we knew they were expecting a child. Thus people working the dining room would promptly go to the back, grab a balloon and a plush cow to give to the patron.

    The problem however, was at this point all the people working the dining room were new and hadn’t a clue about the wristbands.

    As my luck would have it, the one day we were short on dining room members I decided to help out and my manager wanted me to show the rest of the crew what we do when those customers would come in.

    The man that had a wristband that day looked somber, I could tell something was off and pushed my manager to just let him be. But my manager insisted I go over there. So I put on my usual fake smile and went up to the man ready to hand him a balloon and a plush.

    “Welcome, to Chick-Fil-A,” I said. “I see you have a wristband. On behalf of our entire crew we want to congratulate you on your new family member.”

    The man put his hand up and, as nicely as possible, shared with me the bad news.

   “Thank you,” he said. “But actually, it was a miscarriage.”

    In front of at least 15 employees, I forced this man to share something so private on what probably was one of the worst days of his life.

   I apologized, went to the back of the kitchen and told my manager what happened. Almost immediately one of the new workers informed me that she too asked him about his baby not more than 10 minutes before I did and was kind enough not to tell a single one of the rest of us.

   So to the man with the wristband, I’m sorry. It was just another case of Bad Luck Joe.