Post #1

I know. That's not a very inspired title, is it?

But who cares? It's the first post of a new blog!

This is something of a sister blog to my other, regular one, Keepin' It Reel. As an early-twenty-something 68% of the way through college about to study abroad all next year in Spain, and well aware of my financial situation (read: bleak) I took a summer job at a fast-food joint.

It's not important which one, mainly because what is described in this blog- namely, customer tomfoolery- is likely played out in hundreds upon thousands of restaurants all across this fair country each and every day.

Needless to say, I'm not very high up the ladder in this company yet. Just a worker drone, or officially, crew member. I'm not even technically a fry cook. It just sounded like a cool URL. Thus far I have been trained to dunk fries and hand out orders through drive-thru window #2. Although sometimes it doubles if customers forget to pay at window #1, which happens more often than you might think.

Don't get me wrong- given the choice between working fries for 8 hours and handing out orders for 8 hours, I would definitely hand out orders. That way you get to talk to people, rude as they might turn out to be.

Generally, in any given shift, I encounter 3 types of customers:

1. The Friendlies: my favorites. Sometimes I know them personally. Sometimes they are just normal levels of pleasant, sometimes way more so! Mess up an order? No problem! Ask them to pull up? "Well, sure! Thank you!"

2. The Indifferents: the ones who act like you don't exist at all. Especially weird when they don't even have a phone to shut you out with.
Oh, did someone say "have a nice day"?

3. The Unfriendlies. Self-explanatory, and also not particularly common. Heaven help you if you make a mistake when dealing with these folks.

Posts on this blog will likely be few and far between, unless I have an experience that's too weird not to share. That said, the rest of this post will consist of all the customer horror stories I have to date. They did not all happen today, 20 July 2013.


Postmortem Picnic
A lady pulls up in a minivan. I hand out their order as her drunk and/or high-seeming passenger pipes up.
"Can I have a burger for my daughter? She's with God."
What the what?
Now, she could have said "Dad", as in the alleged girl's dad. But there was nothing else rung up on the screen, and it sure sounded like God. She let it drop until I handed out the drinks and wished them a nice day.
Then, "Can I have a toy for my daughter?" The driver shushed her and pulled away.
Mourning, or messing with me? The world may never know, let alone me.

Shoe-wee BabyA lady pulls up in a minivan. (Why are they always minivans?) I hand her out her large iced tea, then do a double take when I spot the baby lying naked on the passenger seat, upside down and wedged under a tennis shoe.
Closer inspection revealed it was a baby doll. Whew!

Coffee Chaos
I wasn't exactly properly trained to be an order hander-outer (aka presenter) so I learned on the fly my first couple of days and there are still a couple of surprises here and there. One of the things you learn is how to make special iced coffees. We have chocolate caramel, regular caramel, sugar free vanilla, regular vanilla and hazelnut, to be mixed with one of those big long spoons.
For large, the recipe is 6 shots of cream and 6 shots of flavor. Only yours truly got that mixed up with medium (3 of each) and handed the wrong proportion out the window.
"That's not how it looks in Troy," the driver declared as her two little kids listened on. "And it's not how it tastes in Troy!"
Then it dawned on me. I apologized. I fixed it, keeping up my patented laughy, happy-go-lucky banter I've learned from my mom. No good humor would rescue this one, however.
"You didn't stir this with your hands, did you?" she asked when I gave her the new one. (Bear in mind we're talking about 30 ounces of icy liquid here) "I don't want your fingers touching my coffee."
"Oh, no, ma'am. I couldn't mix that with my hands if I wanted to!" Awkward laugh, a last attempt to wring a hint of a smile out of her.
No such luck. "You better make it right the next time!" she shouted as she pulled away.
I turned to my next order.
"You know you could have just added 3 extra shots," my manager said, having witnessed most of the doomed transaction.
I had a feeling that wouldn't have gone over well.

Holy Smoke
Less of a single instance than an oft-repeated one, unfortunately: walls of smoke from countless windows rolled down, more often than not with little kids in the car.

Unfast Food
10 sandwiches in 2 varieties show up on my screen.
The way this hour's gone -even normally, for that matter- we do not have 20 sandwiches ready to go.
I say as much to the driver, and follow up with some variation on the dreaded "please pull forward" speech.
You can dress that up with as much politeness and sugar and as many smiles as you want, but you're still going to tick someone off. Or, at the very least, bother them.
As he did so, his passenger yelled, "I thought it was supposed to be fast food!"
"Not when you order 20 sandwiches at once!"
No, of course I didn't say that. But I wanted to.

Unfast Food 2 (or, The Refusal)
Only 5 sandwiches this time, of 3 different varieties. I delivered the dreaded speech, complete with the apologetic shrug I throw in when it's the 2nd or 3rd one in a row.
"No," the driver responded, to my surprise. Don't get me wrong; it's unpleasant for everyone involved. Nobody's happy with this request. I'll get yelled at, cussed at and flipped some birds by customers, but they always actually do it. Not this time.
"I'll wait right here," she went on. "I have to wait like everyone else, I'll wait right here."
"Ma'am," I tried, "there are people behind you. Please pull forward-"
"I have 5 sandwiches. It doesn't take that long."
"Yes, it does." I did actually say that. In a pretty small voice, but I said it.
And she didn't pull up. I had to run out the order for the car behind her, and boy did I hear it from the cars behind that one.

That's all the negative stories I have. I can't forget the funny ones, the cute ones, and the just plain warm fuzzies.

Licensed to Fry
A minivan pulls up. As I'm handing out the lady's order, a little kid in the back points at me.
"What's on your shirt?" he wants to know.
What my mom told me I should have said when I told her this story: "This? It's my badge. I'm licensed to fry."
In retrospect, given the kid's age- I was guessing 6, tops- I think it would have gone right over his head.
What I actually said: "It's my nametag! What's your name?" went just fine, and resulted in brief and friendly small talk, always a good thing for employee performance.

Free Frappe
Whenever a duplicate is made of a special drink like a shake or a mocha or something, usually the result of someone failing to hit the serve button and get rid of the order (oops) it's handed out to the next unsuspecting customer. Or customers. Free desserts are a lot harder to hand out than I ever thought.
Not the case of this particular rogue mocha frappe.
"Oh, thank you!" its new owner exclaimed with glee. "I can never afford these things!"

And actually, almost as many times as there are people smoking, there are either:
-dogs in plain sight. I've seen pit bulls, Shih Tzus, Cocker Spaniels and one Pikachu (Pekingese/Chihuahua mix)
-little kids totally zonked in the backseat. It's pretty cute :)