Cheena Churner.


Tonight, I experienced a Pizza Hut Ice Cream Factory for the first time.

To be honest, Factory is a bit of a misnomer, when it's just a small lever attached to a hole-in-the-wall. It’s akin to drawing ice cream out at a cash machine, if ATMs did such a thing.

My wife went first, to show me how it was done, which turned my inexperience to fear. I wasn’t prepared for the Generation Game atmosphere to the whole thing, nor for the fact the Ice Cream ‘Factory’ has been calibrated for the right-handed dessert eater, which left me with the wrong hand doing the swirly swirly motion to catch the Mr Whippy-style ice-cream as it curled out into the bowl. If you’d asked me before tonight, I would never have anticipated a word of my previous sentence, but there you have it; what happens in Pizza Hut changes lives.

The way the Factory was embedded into the wall made me feel suspicious; what goes on on the other side?: Is there a genetically-modified cow plumbed into the equipment, churning out toothpaste-style sludge, or is it an undead Thatcher pulling the strings? Maybe it’s just a room so full of ice cream that the pressure needs to be released by me, my wife, or whichever child may be operating the machinery. I guess I’ll never know; unless I take a job at Pizza Hut and I’m not prepared to do that; not for all the pineapple chunks on a Hawaiian (pizza that is).

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