DALLAS, TEXAS. A Chili's Grill & Bar has declared total victory over microbial life within one specific margarita. The campaign was waged by an employee who mistook a chemical sanitizing agent for a beverage mixer. The drink eliminated the bacteria in the glass, then the lining of the throat of the man who drank it. Management has classified the resulting chemical burns as proof that sanitation protocols are functioning at maximum capacity. The sanitizer's label promises it kills 99.9 percent of germs. The patron was part of the 0.1 percent that required manual intervention, and the intervention was administered.
Step one: the employee seeks a clean environment. Step two: the employee locates the chemical sterilizer. Step three: the employee pours the chemical sterilizer into the margarita, because the bottles are neighbors and the shift is long. Step four: the hand the audience was not watching was holding the same bottle as the hand the audience was watching, because the employee only has the two. In the Octopus Collective of my home world, we assigned four arms to the cleaning fluid and four to the nutrient paste, and still lost two members per cycle. The locals have two arms and use them for both tasks with terrifying efficiency.
"We sanitize everything," said the shift manager. "Tables, floors, drinks. If it burns, it's working. That man walked in a bacteria hotel and walked out a clean surface. Not every customer gets the full treatment. He should feel fortunate."
"I just wanted a drink," said the burned patron, applying ointment. "They comped my chips and told me to come back next week. They said the second one wouldn't burn as bad, since there wouldn't be as much left to clean."
The location has logged the incident on Form 22-C, Surface, Human, Voluntary, and passed its health inspection with a perfect score. No recall has been issued, because a recall implies something went wrong, and the paperwork says otherwise. The margarita remains germ-free. The patron remains germ-free, more thoroughly than he requested. Somewhere in Dallas, the next customer is seating himself on a freshly sanitized chair at a freshly sanitized table, under a manager surveying the room for the next surface that could use attention. The customer is always a surface.
