I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that asking the convenient store clerk if I could expect to dance with salmonella after eating one of their chicken breakfast sandwiches that may or may not have been under the heat lamp for a week would be deemed offensive to the clerk.

It’s a pretty offensive question to the guy who made the sandwich, I guess. What I didn’t explain to him was that I’m so hungry that even if I were guaranteed to be poisoned by that sandwich, I would still have choked it down. By asking the question, I was simply trying to figure if I needed to change my schedule for the next few days to accommodate the soul-coughing and frequent/furious diarrhea that salmonella brings. Also, trying to jokingly gauge how long that sandwich had been sitting there in the hopes that he’d see me grab one and then say, “no, don’t take that one. The fresh ones are here behind the counter. Take one.”

That’s all my question was about. No harm, no foul.