Sunday Rerun: Meat me on the front porch

Maybe I'm a big old cynic, or maybe I'm the wisest man in the world.  There can be no middle ground in the situation I'm about to share with you...

Yesterday, I was in the kitchen, waiting for the Dr Phil show to be over so I could turn the television on, and there was a jaunty knock at the door.  I answered it to find a young man on the porch, advising me that he was a route salesperson for a certain meat company, and that he had finished his route for the day and found he had steak and chicken left over.  If I would "pick up" the steak, he proposed to throw the chicken in free for nothin'.

"Picking up" the steak, in this case, means "buying" a crate of frozen steak that was in the back of a van conveniently idling down by the end of the driveway.

"The steak" in this case, for all I know, was recently on a carcass being ridden down the homestretch at Pimlico.

I told the guy no thanks, and to my utter amazement, he did not go away gracefully, instead waxing rhapsodic about how great it would be to fire up the grill and toss a couple of his carnivore's delights on there, or toss a Caesar salad and grill up some poultry and there I'd go!

Betcha it didn't look like this!

I told him I was not in the habit of buying frozen meat from people I've never heard of.  Now, if you were to have someone driving through the neighborhood selling cases of beer out of the back of a van, then we might have something to talk about!

When I got a minute, I went online and googled "door to door meat salesperson" and opened up a veritable onslaught of complaints from across the nation, all from people who answered the siren call of cheap meat and were very shortly very sorry, as they tried to saw their way through a porterhouse of dubious provenance.

So, I'm glad I didn't buy the steaks, because I'm chicken.