Whopppeeeeee .... errrrrr

It was Sunday, as I recall. Not raining, not burning hot, average mediocre temperature in a tropical city of Jakarta.

A young boy, aged 9, alone, walked into a fast-food restaurant. It was his favourite. He walked semi-confidently to the counter, which was now 3 meters in front of him, and stood only 10 centimeters shorter than he was. There was no line in front of the counter. Not so many people prefered burger as their meal that year or ever. On the counter waited a young man, probably twenty-something, with a uniform and a pin on his left chest that said "Burger King".

Our boy arrived at the counter and was greeted, "May I help you?" asked the man on the counter. Our boy then said, "Yes, please. I would like one double whopper. One double cheeseburger. Two milkshakes; one vanilla and one strawberry. And a portion of your onion rings." Their onion rings was the best, he thought.

Instead of punching the buttons on his cashier machine, the guy wearing Burger King pin on the counter, with God-only-knows intentions, asked our boy, "How much money do you have with you, then?" He decorated this question with a smirk. You know, a regular Indonesian smirk which is so freakishly easy to be mistaken as a smile.

Our boy (I tell you again), who was nine, without any bitchiness grown or fed into him, could only say, "I have some." I kinda forgot what happened afterwards. But transaction somehow was successfully made. The cashier guy might have had him show his money and then started punching that cashier machine and gave him what he wanted.

Or in the utopian world, the cashier perhaps realized that it was rude to behave like that and it was clearly a mistake to think that a 9-year-old boy couldn't afford a lunch for two. At a Burger fucking King.

Some years later, after this traumatic incident, the boy returned to the same restaurant. This time he knew, he could afford all he wanted for lunch. And if there was to be another question similar to the one that he had, he would simply be spiteful and degrading. He prepared and gathered all of his courage to be so, only to be utterly shocked to find that he was walking into an empty spot.

There were chairs and tables there, but certainly there were no men and women working behind the counter with pins that said Burger King. The restaurant no longer operated in this very place, and to be more general in the country that he lived. He never heard of that.

Burger King stayed as his favourite fast food restaurant though, despite the ugly incident.

So it is only natural if I was so excited this morning to see this advertisement on the left in a famous local newspaper. And tomorrow or some days soon in the future, the boy will visit this restaurant again, after all these years.

This time, should questions or smirks like that be asked, there will definitely be a scene unraveled in front of the counter, and it won't be a lovingly PG-13-rated one.

I hope I got smirked though. And I hope I can return the smirk with something offensively equal. I owe it to the boy that much.

Enjoy your double whopper, little boy.