Compelled By Reality

Free Chick-Fil-A

Filed under: Blogging

I wanted to tell you about the great time I had baking in the sun and sweating the night away. Also, I thought I would mention this to you in case you weren’t aware.

Whenever Chick-Fil-A opens a new restaurant anywhere, they offer 1 year of free Chick-Fil-A (CFA) combo meals to the first 100 people in line. This has become known to CFA as “the first 100″ and low and behold a new restaurant opened within 30 minutes of IHOP.

This has happened a few times before here in KC, so I wasn’t the first to discover this deal. A few friends from my team (actually almost half the team found subs so that they could participate). So how this actually worked was that you are allowed to start camping out in front of the store no earlier than 24 hours in advance of the opening, and they open at 6:30am. So I talk to my friend Caleb who has done this many times before and said to show up at 10:30-11:00am the day before and I should be fine.

So I take my time that morning get up and head out. I am going to stop and get a folding chair at a local hardware store, but I get going and completely forget about it. I pull up to the CFA and see dozens of tents all over the parking lot, a basketball game going, a foursquare game (which was surprisingly to me one of the best games).

I park my car and go get in line to sign in. It’s a little after 10am and it turns out that I was #97 in line! I was 3 away from not making it! But after I got over that shock I went and found my friends and the tent I was sleeping in that night.

So the way it worked was that once the 100 people showed up and signed in. Every hour or two they would require us to line up into four rows so that they could count everyone and make sure that no one had left. If you leave the parking lot at anytime after you signed in, you were disqualified. You were not allowed to leave the grounds for any reason. It was a little eerily reminiscent of end-time concentration camps (but thats another topic altogether). However, another cool benefit is they fed you Chick-Fil-A for lunch, dinner and snacks. They also provided ice, tea, and water all day for everyone there.

Some of the highlights of the day/night for me there were the intense foursquare games, the scavenger hunt where I placed 2nd and received a CFA hat and CFA deck of cards, and of course the morning we received the 52 coupons for free CFA combo meals. Other highlights were the 7 hours of straight DJing (not my favorite thing), water balloon toss, other games, dance contest.

Here are some other photos of the event:

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