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Wednesday, August 11, 2010

9 Blood-Boiling Actions People Do at the Drive-Thru

Fast Food Drive-Thru. It's something we all experience in life. And there should probably be a course on it in high school, especially since there seem to be so many people who don't know what the hell they are doing once they get there.

9. Not Knowing What You Want
Fast Food restaurants are not that complicated. It’s pretty much split up into a certain food theme, with very few over-lapping. If you go to McDonalds, you get a burger or chicken sandwich/fingers. KFC is chicken. Wendy’s is crap burgers. Burger King is…ok yeah you get it. So seriously, you have to have some idea of what you want, right? Is this your first time here? We know it’s not since we’ve seen you before. So then why does it take you 5 minutes to decide what you want? Did you know what you wanted, but that big bad menu board killed your confidence and now you have to look over the whole thing, just to decide on exactly what you wanted in the first place? If you don’t know what you want, here’s an idea: how about you park your car, and then walk your fat ass inside to gawk at the menu board. The drive-thru is for fast service, which doesn’t quite work when everyone ‘needs a minute’ to decide what they want.

8. Waiting until You get to the Window to Order More Food
What, you didn’t order enough? In that wave of ordering the food for the small army you have waiting at home, you forgot what you wanted, because you need something smaller/healthier than the food you’re feeding them? Did you forget a diet drink to go with that artery-clogging fried double meat-cheese-bacon-hold-the-healthy-stuff sandwich? Fine, we can do that (it won’t be with a smile), but it’s just slowing things down more, which always leads to more bitching. Just don’t let the bitching come from you.

7. Not Pulling Up Close Enough to the Window
This isn’t so much angering as it is annoying. It’s one thing to pull too close (that’s a little creepy), but if the cashier needs someone to hold their feet while they lean out the window to get your money because you parked 5 feet away, you might need some practice driving. So please, if you can’t pull your car close enough to the window to give the cashier your money without them falling out the window to get it, park in the lot (a space would be asking too much) and come inside.

6. Pulling Away from the Speaker Box Without Your Total
Ok, now you’re just being a dick. It’s our job to take your order and give you the total, because it makes it so much easier to collect the money if you know what it is and have it ready (see below for more on that). So if you pull ahead without hearing you’re total, we take it as you already know it, so we expect you to have the money ready. I mean, if that’s not true, then I will be happy to believe you do not care about money, and are willing to pay any amount of money for this food, with me adding a bit for being such a great order taker.

5. Not Having Your Money Ready When You Get to the Window
So let’s say you stayed at the speaker box to hear your total, and pulled close enough to the window to save the cashier stretch marks. Congrats! You passed level one. Now the real test. Do you have your money ready? No? Well, why the hell not? You heard your total at the speaker box. You didn’t have enough time you say? Well, if you had to wait for the person in front of you, that’s bull shit and you know it. But fine, we’ll say there was no one in front of you. You knew you were coming to a fast food drive-thru right? Shouldn’t it have clicked that eventually you would need to pay? At some point in the ordering, it’s not an impossible feat to pull your wallet out and be ready for the inevitable. Not having your money ready just slows us down, which slows you down, which you then bitch about, even though it was your fault to begin with.

4. Controlling the Volume of Your Voice
You’re not 2 years old. You have been living long enough to know how to use a basic function of life, your voice. And you know that using said voice requires you to adjust its volume every once in a while. You’re not in church anymore, old lady, you can speak above a whisper. And you, mister I-can’t-hear-anything-since-I’m-too-old, just because you can’t hear doesn’t mean you need to scream into the box. Please, I would like to maintain whatever hearing I have left, and going from having to strain to hear one order to holding the head set away from my ears for the next is slowly making me deaf.

3. Ordering from the Passenger Seat
Speaking of voice volumes, I would love to hear the reasoning behind this little phenomenon. Is the driver a mute? Or is he (I say he because it’s usually the woman ordering from the passenger seat with the man driving) to stupid to know how to do anything but drive? Why in God’s name would you think we can hear you from the passenger seat, when half the time we can’t hear you from the driver seat? I’m sure the explanation will make me want to put a gun to my head, so don’t answer. Instead, how about next time just tell the driver what you want? Or how about you drive, since apparently you have control issues if you can’t let someone order for you. One last thing, if you do this, and we can’t hear you, it’s not our fault. So if you’re the driver in this situation, please don’t yell as loud as you can into the box after the third “what?”, thinking we are the idiots.

2. Talking on Your Cell Phone
This should be a no brainer, right? I mean, you drove hear just to talk to us to get food. What happened, did you get lonely on the way here, and now you’re in such a heated debate about the meaning of life that you cannot possibly tear yourself away from your conversation for 2 minutes while you order food (you know, the whole reason you came here in the first place)? Talking on your phone causes so much confusion. Are you talking to us? Are you talking to them? Are you talking to us for them? Are you ignoring everyone and talking to yourself? And oh, here’s the icing on the cake. You pull up, and we answer you, just waiting to take your order, since taking orders is the reason for our being for 5 hours a day. And what happens? You tell us to…wait for it…Hold. On. !@&$ You son of a-

1. Not Telling Us You Have a Coupon
This is the ultimate attack the customers have against us poor fast food grunts. Let’s get one thing straight: there are a million coupons out there that you could have. There is no possible way for us to know exactly what coupon you have. So just ordering from the coupon, without telling us you have the coupon, is the most dumbshit thing you can possibly do. Well no, that’s a lie. The most dumbshit thing you can do is not tell us, then proceed to get mad when we didn’t know you had a coupon. Trust me, I would love to be able to read your mind (that’s another lie, because I’ve known dogs who are smarter than most people), but truth be told if I could do that I wouldn’t be slaving away working in the fast food business. I’d be saving the world, most likely from idiots like you.

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