Mention of OCD reminds me of a scene from a Jack Nicholson movie (though it’s not the one where he suffers from OCD).
That link has a little of the before- and after- scenes. Click here to start just before the waitress says “No substitutions.”
This is why whenever we eat at someplace like Red Robin, for example, I order “everything on the side” rather than play “confuse the cook.” I want my burger with 1 slice of tomato, not two, light lettuce, and no mayo. Much easier to just assemble it myself. The cooks don’t mind and it saves everybody some hassle.
Admittedly, it’s been a while since I worked in a fast food joint, but the only guy I can really remember hating over his special order was a guy who would always order his fries with no salt specifically so that he would get fresh fries. (We could see him salting them, rather heavily, afterwards.) “No salt” fries required us to do an extra clean of the fry bin and fry scoop to get the old salt off, which really slowed down the routine for all the cashiers, not just the one who was helping him. And that slowed down serving the other customers as well.
Thing is, he was a regular customer, and always came in when we were moderately busy. If he had simply asked, “Any chance of getting fresh fries from the next batch?”, any cashier would probably have quietly given him his request. But he had to be a special, special snowflake and inconvenience everyone.
Semi-related story:
I’m a regular at the nearby Whataburger, mainly because they’ve got the best breakfast fast food I’ve ever had. In particular, I love their egg sandwiches, which are just a fried egg and a slice of cheese on a bun. Says so right on the menu.
Trouble is, I must be one of the very few people who order it. Most of the folks there know the menu, so no trouble. But once in a while I’ll get a new guy on the register who’s never heard of the egg sandwiches. They assume, not unreasonably, that it’s just an egg and bun, no cheese. I got that the other day, and while I ate it because food, it was really dry.
So the next time I went to Whata, I gave the guy my order and mentioned that I’d had trouble with some folks leaving the cheese off even though it’s right on the menu, and without the cheese, “it’s just dry as all hell.” The guy assured me he’d make sure the cheese was on there, and went off to I guess talk with the cook. When he handed me the bag, he goes, “Here you go sir, and I hope they’re not dry as all hell for you now.”
I was as polite as I knew how to be, and he was very professional and polite, and he was just repeating my own words back to me, but even so it was the first time I ever wondered if someone spit in my food.
Then I ate it anyway, because I’m not that big a weenie. It’s just spit.
I don’t work in fast food, but we’ve got a lot of customers like this.
No matter how many times you explain to them as to WHY this or that won’t work, you’ll be unhappy, etc., etc., they’ll still insist. So we go ahead.
When they do become upset, we gently point out that it was THEIR decision. It’s amazing how the “special snowflake” melts in some of them. The others will report us as being rude, but TPTB will point out that “they’re professionals, they KNOW what they’re talking about, and if you don’t like it, feel free to take your business elsewhere.”
As a customer, I get annoyed when the clerk thinks that a substitution (one kind of cheese for another) should be charged as an extra add-on. I order at enough Mickey D’s to know that such a substitution is no extra charge, but sometimes I have to argue about it. I always win.
And most MD fries have WAY too much salt for my taste – no, it’s not a medical thing, I just don’t like that much, so I order “low salt.” The word “low” is a stranger to them.
“NO salt?”
“No, LOW salt, like LITE salt. Just throw it in the tray and don’t add any more salt.”
See, now I thought that would be impossible in any fast food place because they automatically salt the fries without a second thought. I’m not a salt fan either, but I accept that’s just the way it is at a fast food place.
This is perhaps the best curse I have ever read.
I worked a year at McDonalds and a year at a pizza place. Special orders didn’t bother me at all.
Ordering fries with no salt is how you get a fresh batch of fries made.
First high school job for me was Burger King. This was years –oy, decades- ago.
“Hold-the-pickles” type orders were no problem whatsoever. The only ones that were difficult to accommodate were fries without salt -you had to get tongs and remove the fries straight out of the fryer basket- and a request for a burger cooked medium. That one didn’t come too often but if it did, you put the patty onto the conveyor belt style broiler we used and with this metallic hook we had on hand, you would yank the belt forward (not too sure this explanation makes any sense) and that would start the patty at about the three-quarter mark. Result? A patty that was about as close to medium as you could get for a fast-food place and with surprisingly little hassle.
But fries are made so frequently that I never have a problem with them being hot and fresh. If I order low salt, they often come TOO hot.
They don’t salt them if you tell them not to. That’s what special ordering is for.
When I briefly worked as a shoe salesman (Kinney Shoes), the manager told me a story similar to this. At one store where he had worked, they had a regular customer who happened to be an extremely obese woman. Who insisted on buying and wearing tall, spike-heeled pumps. The heels of which would consistently break off under her weight. And which she would then return as “defective”. After giving her several refunds and/or replacements under this scenario, he finally had a very careful, polite conversation with her in which he apologetically explained that it was apparent that his store’s shoes were not the high quality she needed, and that perhaps she should seek out a brand that would suit her needs better.
As for special orders in restaurants … it’s been a long time since I cooked fast food, but fast food isn’t much different from other types of restaurants in this regard. An individual special order isn’t really much of a problem for me, though I’ve mentioned here before that adding something extra is always easier than “holding” an ingredient that the item would normally come with. This is mainly a muscle-memory thing - if you’ve made a particular item the same stock way hundreds of times, your hands have an automatic pattern they follow without having to even really think about it. So it’s very easy to just automatically grab that ingredient the customer didn’t want and slap it on the food, and then say, “Oh !@#$” because now you have to start all over again. For this reason, I’ve often said that the most difficult special request for a breakfast cook is “dry toast”. When toast comes with everything, you don’t think of making it as a series of steps - it’s all one thing: “make toast”. Taking the toast out of the toaster with one hand and grabbing the butter knife with the other is all one motion from the cook’s perspective, and it’s just completely automatic.
Adding something extra is much easier. Even if you forget, you can always slap it on at the last minute without having to completely start over.
The only special orders that really infuriated me (in fast food, anyway) were the big ones where you’d get somebody who would come in for an order “to go”, apparently intending to take it home to feed everybody at his family reunion. And it would be 15 of the exact same thing, except every one of them needs to be made with a different combination of condiments. “Uh, I need 15 double cheeseburgers. 1 with no cheese, 1 with nothing but ketchup on it, one with no mustard, one with no onions, 1 with extra cheese…” And then that person will stand there complaining about “what’s taking so long?” Or, better yet, do this in the drive-thru.
And this person is always RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME in the drive-through line.
Yeah, there’s a special place in hell for the people who want to order a dozen bagels or whatever smack in the middle of the rush period and have no idea which ones they want.
When I worked at McDonald’s, the people who would order “no-salt fries” (or low-salt fries, for that matter) right in the middle of lunch rush were the only ones who really pissed me off. It meant we had to hold everything up at the fry station, get all of the previous fries out of there, wipe out all the salt from the bin (which was annoying and also slightly painful because you’d always wind up grinding hot greasy salt into your skin), wait for a fresh batch of fries to come out, and the whole time people are piling up at the front counter behind the “no-salt” person. Not to mention that most of those people don’t give a damn about the salt content of their fries. They just want a hot, fresh batch. Which they would have got anyway, because it’s the middle of lunch rush.
Extra onions/no pickles or whatever was no big deal, though.
When I worked fast food special orders didn’t bother me. “Hold the” anything always saved me time. “Extra” something was no trouble since it was probably going on the burger anyway.
I did hate the no-salt Miltons that would come in when I worked at McDonald’s, though. Although they were usually older people who probably were doing it for health reasons. If you come in during a dead period - fine. But no salt during the dinner rush affects everybody.
I will never forget the gentleman I observed in a McDonalds on Fraser St. in Vancouver. All he wanted was a Filet-o-Fish patty for his cat. Just the patty, with nothing else - not even heated.
I imagine that this would be a bit annoying, but possibly manageable. What made it absolutely excruciating was that he insisted that he should only be charged a dollar for the patty. He stated that this was a very simple matter, and that every McDonalds franchise between Florida and Vancouver had helpfully done this for him on his way up, and he had no idea why these particular people were being such unreasonable pricks about it.
As I stood in the line behind him, I had dark thoughts about subduing him and renting a spot for his RV long enough for the cat to chew through his corpse.
Craziest order I ever had while working at Burger King was a fellow that wanted his Whopper and his childs hamburger cooked extra done. I assumed he wanted them extra hot and doubled the microwave time. The customer brought them back and said they were not done enough. I ended up running the burgers through the broiler twice. What came out was two dessicated hockey pucks. The whopper had shrunk to almost a normal burgers size and the other burger was tiny. He seemed happy though. The other thing that suprised me when I worked there was off menu foods that customers would order. We sold a few ham and cheese sandwiches and quarter pounders a day.
As an add-on to the fry thing, sometimes people will order heavy mayo to get a fresher sandwich.
Even when I worked at McDonald’s over 30 years ago, there wouldn’t have been a way to do this. We punched the orders into a computer thing which had a button for each item. The system wouldn’t allow for charging a dollar for something unless maybe you could fake it by finding something else that cost a dollar and ringing that up but then you’d fuck up the inventory.
This reminds me of an old lady who would come in when I worked there. She would order three cooked hamburger patties without anything else but she would pay for three full hamburgers. Of course, it was also for her cat.