Amazing what a half baked potato can do

“Can I have a ninety-nine cent double cheeseburger please?” As I looked in my wallet for a dollar and some change, the McDonald’s worker says, “We don’t have that here.” In my head I said, “What! What do you mean you don’t have the dollar menu?” I looked at the menus above and to my surprise there was no dollar menu up there. I ended up just ordering a double cheeseburger costing me $1.59 or so.
That day I ate at McDonalds because I didn’t bring lunch. That was the day I discovered Downtown Chicago McDonalds’ dollar menu doesn’t exist. Over the summer, I interned at the Illinois State Treasurer’s office in the J.R. Thompson Center Downtown Chicago. Anyone that has ever been downtown of a major city knows that it is expensive to eat or to do anything.
One day I brought some leftovers for lunch, which included half of a potato. The J.R. Thompson Center has lunch rooms on each floor; I worked on the top floor; the fifteenth. I went to the lunch room and I attempted to cook my half potato in the microwave but noticed that I didn’t have anything on which to cook it. There were some paper napkins so I decided to use them for cooking. While the potato was in the microwave, I sat down at the table to wait, that’s when I started to smell something burning in the microwave, I opened the microwave door, and saw smoke coming from the napkins. The potato didn’t look very appetizing at this point so I threw both it and the napkin in a garbage can. The lady sitting down having lunch was watching me as I threw the potato in the garbage and she left, that’s when it got worst.
The smell of the smoke began to get stronger; it smelled like someone was burning something outside on a grill. I went to the garbage can to throw away my water bottle and, to my surprise; a cloud of smoke blew into my face. I started to panic and my whole body was shaking. I darted for the bathroom to put water in my bottle to pore into the garbage can. While running back and forth from the bathroom to the garbage can, I could hear a lady in the background asking the security guard about the awful smell. After four to five runs into the bathroom, I finally extinguished the smoldering potato. While collecting my stuff, the lady that was there earlier came back to sit with her friend. Soon afterward, as I was leaving, the security guard came into the lunch room to ask if anyone burned something and the lady from earlier said, “a girl had burned a potato.” After getting back to my desk I sat down with a sigh of relief and thought about what just happened, and how I almost burned the whole building down. I had this image in my mind; Treasurer’s office intern Lauren-Ashley burned the J.R. Thompson Center down, Channel 2 News. Eating out seems much cheaper now then it did before.