Crock, 9/24/25

In my freshman year of college, there was an outbreak of E. coli at various Jack in the Boxes that killed four children, and a friend of mine who had worked at McDonald's told me something I have never forgotten, which was that (at the time, anyway) they never taught fast food workers how to tell if a burger was cooked properly, but instead just taught them to put it on a bun when the timer rang. "If that timer went haywire and started ringing early, I would have definitely been serving people raw hamburgers," he said. It was enough to keep me off fast food hamburgers for life, though for some entirely fake reason the flash-fried breaded chicken products seem safe to me. Anyway, my point is, I was using this news peg to play my fun "what year is this Crock rerun from?" game and was going to triumphantly announce that it was 1993, but then I saw that it actually had a 1997 copyright date, which means that even upon its original publication it was four years out of date.

Luann, 9/24/25