THE DIVINE BURRITO: CHIPOTLE'S INFERNO

Last night I waited in a line for over 40 minutes to get a free burrito. Was it worth it? I'll let you decide. 

Let me tell you me tale of woe:

Earlier in the week, my husband and I got our free burrito coupons from Chipotle (the company who decided that giving away thousands of free burritos in the next few weeks will apparently help them make more money. But, after causing numerous outbreaks of E. coli across the country, I suppose free burritos for the world is the least they could do). We both had some free time in the middle of the day, and we were in the area, so we thought that maybe we’d grab our burritos for a late lunch. Why not? But when we got there, the line was wrapping around inside the entire restaurant and we decided it wasn’t worth it. “We’ll just come back later tonight,” we said. So, around 7:30, we showed up at Chipotle. AND THE LINE WAS OUT THE DOOR. But we had already denied ourselves our burritos once, and we weren’t going to back down once more. So what if our hands froze? So what if the inversion piped pollutants into our lungs while we waited outside for so long? So what if we went into cryosleep?

We were getting food. And that food was free.

(And it may or may not give us E. coli.)

For the first thirty seconds, it wasn’t so bad. “The line should move pretty quickly,” we said. Only it didn’t. But, I’ve waited in lines before for things: movie tickets, roller coasters, the self-checkout line at Wal-Mart when all thirty of the normal check out aisles are inexplicably closed, and I’ve survived. I've made it through. So, frozen or not, we were going to wait for these sweet burreets. But then, the SHE SCREECHER got in line behind us.

Now, though I am easily irritated by noises, I’m usually pretty tolerant of people’s voices, no matter how grating. But that’s probably because those people aren’t normally six inches behind my ear and talking as loud as possible in that grating voice—a voice unlike any voice I previously thought could come out of a human being. I soon discovered that she was the third wheel of what I learned during the next 40 minutes was a very, very strange tricycle, that yelled like a banshee to say simple things, like, “I WONDER WHY THIS LINE ISN’T MOVING.” “HEY DEREK. I HOPE YOU REALIZE WHAT A GREAT GIRLFRIEND YOU HAVE BECAUSE SHE IS LIKE THE BEST.” “HEY I WORKED OUT TODAY.” “I ONLY LET MYSELF WATCH PARKS AND REC WHEN I’M AT THE GYM SO THAT MOTIVATES ME TO GO HA HA HA.” “DO YOU KNOW HOW OUR FRIEND SO AND SO IS DOING? I NEED TO TALK TO HER MORE.” And, my personal favorite, “I WOULD SCRATCH YOUR EYES OUT IF YOU DID THAT HA HA HA.”

(Because I was already picturing her as a bird with that nails on a chalkboard, one tone, screeching screech voice. The image of her using her large talons to scratch out the eyes of her best friend just worked.)

This noise was happening the entire time. So picture that. We finally moved inside of the restaurant and into the warmth, then stayed in the same spot for over ten minutes. I have no idea why this happened. Man buns were staring back at me from every direction. After a while, a group of guys came in and cut approximately fifty people in line. That made me happy, because I wanted the incessant screeching behind me to continue on as long as possible. Eventually I started to lose consciousness. My brain started to leak out of my assaulted ear. The circle-shaped line made me wonder if I’d already circled around before, and then I realized, with horror, that I must have wound up in Dante’s Inferno within its rings of punishment and I, I was experiencing a punishment perfectly calculated to be the most excruciating for me. And I might never get my burrito. But deeper within the rings of punishment were the employees behind the counter, who were clearly an inch from insanity.

Whenever one looked up to say “What would you like?” or “Black or pinto beans?” you could see their desperation. There was fear in their eyes. They looked up at the customers and never-ending line like Prometheus, chained to his rock and watching the eagle come down to eat out his liver, over and over again. And there was no stopping it, for Chipotle had already opened up the Pandora’s Box of free burritos, and there was no hope that came out with them. We were like vultures flocking to a giant, perpetually regenerating carcass. We were like bugs drawn to an edible bug zapper that could never zap us. It was like Del Taco on Tuesday. And though new workers kept piling through the door in a desperate attempt to abate the carnage, they all knew they were fighting a war they were going to lose. And at the end of it all they’d be left lifeless on the backroom floor covered in their own salsa.

Because nothing could lessen the lure of getting free spoonfuls of guacamole that night, instead of paying an extra $1.95 for them. (side note—I don’t understand that price. I can get an entire avocado for 88 cents at Winco. But I digress.)

Somehow, somewhere between going deaf in my right ear, losing my sight looking at all the man buns, and observing the animalistic behaviors of starving college students, I looked up and a frightened man with deer-in-the-headlights face was asking me what I wanted to order. But he already knew what I wanted. Because we were all there for the same thing. 

I tried to reassure him with a smile and an empathetic look that said “I’m sorry you have to go through this,” but he didn’t seem to notice. He was already flying through assembling my free mountain of food. When my husband requested white rice (that I didn’t ask for because I could see that the container was empty and I was trying to be nice and my husband apparently likes to watch people suffer), the employee whipped his head around in terror and silently barked at the kitchen people to give him more white rice, to which a kitchen employee just looked back at him and shook his head in defeat, with a resigned look in his eyes that said “You and I both know there isn’t any more white rice here. THERE WILL NEVER BE ANY MORE WHITE RICE.” The employee helping us slowly turned back around and just started shoveling brown rice onto the tortilla and shaking his head like, “I’m sorry, bro. I’m so sorry.” And my husband said “It’s okay, man. I understand.” I tried to lighten the mood by saying, “Brown rice is healthier, right? That’s great!” But he, trapped in his tornado of furious burrito making, was already onto the next customer, a single tear running down his face.

And, after a combat boot wearing man in line started mosh pitting by himself shouting “Burrito! Burrito! Burrito!” trying to get the rest of the line to join him, to no avail, we decided to tell the exasperated cashier that we were most definitely taking our burritos to go.

So yeah. That happened.

Beyond the therapy sessions we're going to need and the fact that we might have contracted E. coli and the symptoms just haven't manifested themselves yet, I'd say it was worth it. ...actually, I'm not really sure if it was. I don't even really like Chipotle that much. Why did we go again? Oh yeah. 

It was free.