Gravy is a beverage at Gate A. Clear!

I’ve recently been thinking of making a trip back to Denver to visit some friends and while I was looking at the price of plane tickets today (they are freakin’ ridiculous) I was reminded of the Denver airport. The Denver airport isn’t actually in Denver, it’s about 30 miles in the middle of nowhere but it’s very nice.
When my friends and I arrived at the Denver airport we were starving. Now, I don’t know much about the restaurant business but I would think that some important elements to success would be location, luck, and – assuming the chaos theory is correct – a spastic butterfly somewhere south of the equator.

As I was looking at eatery choices I noticed on my left was a restaurant that served whatever is the opposite of heart-healthy cuisine. I think the name of the restaurant was something along the lines of “Dead Cows and Fried Stuff.” Or at least it should have been. Normally, this would be an excellent business concept in the perfect location. In some places gravy is a beverage. It would take a lot of bad luck to keep this business from succeeding.

Then I noticed the bad luck.

I assume that when the owners of the restaurant negotiated their lease, they didn’t ask about the location of the emergency heart defibrillator. It was tragically mounted on the wall next to the Dead Cows and Fried Stuff eatery. I have to believe that was bad luck, and – in all likelihood – bad for business. Across from them was a Subway sandwich place. Subway is most famous for promoting their low-calorie menu options. Ouch.

You might think that no one would make an eating decision based on the location of the emergency heart defibrillator. But as soon as you read “heart defibrillator,” you imagine your own enlarged, blood-starved heart, and hear the paramedics yelling, “Clear!” And that’s if you’re lucky enough to collapse when a trained paramedic is around.
Otherwise, the cashier from Dead Cows and Fried Stuff is going to be the first one on the scene. He’ll have one paddle on your forehead and one on your crotch. It might restart your heart, but you’ll wish it hadn’t.

So where did my friends and I eat? Well, Dead Cows and Fried Stuff of course.