What I don’t get is how, at McDonald’s, if you order a cone, they hand it to you first. They have to; it’s in their little guide. Then you have to hold the cone in your hand and use the other hand to put away your drink and grab the food bag. Does this make any sense at all? (Personally, ordering cones in a drive-thru makes no sense, but I’ve had passengers order cones and noticed this.)
Heh. Those fake intro voices threw me for a loop when they first started using them.
Drive thru voice: “Hi! Welcome to Burger Palace! Would you like to try our new quadruple delux bacon cheese coronary on a platter today?”
Me: thinking to myself: wow, this person sure is happy, what a nice change! “No thanks, I’d just like a large fry and a medium Diet Coke”
Drive thru totally different voice: Caastatic epeatstatic der? static
Me: thinking to myself: The hell? Where’d the friendly guy go, with the static free voice?? “Huh?”
Drive thru staticky voice: staticPeatstatic DER!!static
And so on and so on…
May I add, from the perspective of being behind people in line;
DO NOT ask what is in various food items. If you need to do that, get off your ass and go into the store. “What is in a taco?” “Well ma’am, usually it’s meat, cheese, lettuce and so forth, but for you, today only, I’ll be taking a big long dump down the center of the shell…”
Don’t order $40 worth of food from the drive-through.
Don’t let your forty children decide what they want after you get to the speaker. Get it nailed down before you get there, chumpstain.
For god’s sake, have a fucking clue what you want before you get up to the speaker. The next person in front of me who says “gee, I don’t really know…let me think about it” is going to get a size 11 foot crammed down their throat!
The Cell phone bit. I once sat behind a jackass at Wendy’s who sat at the speaker for nearly 5 minutes talking on his cell phone, ignoring the person asking for his order. I finally yelled to him that he had better hang up at that moment or he could kiss his phone goodbye. I was opening the car door to do just that when he saw me coming and decided it was time to hang up.
No, your gossipy conversation is not more important than my time. Shut the fuck up and order your food already.
[nitpick]
Lord Vega, I’m bewildered as to why Jack introduces himself as Joe!
[/nitpick]
On the OP though, I have to say that you drive-thru people give us customers just as much reason to complain as we do you.
For one thing your rules 1 and 2 contradict each other. Why are we yelling at the top of our lungs at you? Maybe because the communication seems to be accomplished through two tin cans tied by a string, and if we don’t yell, we know you’ll screw up our order like you ALWAYS do!
CaptBushido-
They aren’t rules, they’re examples. Opposites, sure enough.
Just as in, I have far more great customers than I do bad ones. They are opposite as well, see the above exapmple.
And to say that I always screw up the order is complete bullshit, perhaps if you wern’t yelling, and perhaps making the people inside nervous, because you were yelling, they wouldn’t screw up your order. Those are a lot of perhaps, but again, I do not screw up orders every time. I have from time to time, and I am completely understandable to the customers, I apologize and make it up 100%.
After today, I hate drive-thru’s too.
This afternoon my husband, my 2 children, and myself decided to go to the KFC drive through to pick up dinner. We were behind a truck, waiting to order, when we heard a crash. I though a car had hit us from behind but there was no car there. When we got out to investigate we found that the sign (it is made out of metal poles and a height restriction hangs from it) had fallen over onto our car. Needless to say, I was shocked. So I went inside to find the manager and tell her about the poles. The first thing she asked me when I told her was if we had hit it. I said no, we didn’t touch it. She followed me outside to look and said “It will fall if you’ve hit it”, implying that we had hit it. She could see our car, it is a mazda protege. The sign was at least twice as tall as our car and it was obvious that there was no way we hit it. She just had the absolute WORST attitude of anyone I’ve met. She looked at us and sighed “well I guess I have to move the poles now”. She didn’t give a damn that it hit our car and that my 3 year old son and 2 year old daughter were almost hysterical - it was a VERY loud noise, right behind where they were sitting. So we showed her the damage to our car. Her exact words were “I guess you can call your insurance company but I doubt they’ll do anything about the paint scratch”. I then showed her that it wasn’t just a paint scratch, our tail light was busted and there was a dent on our trunk. She just shrugged and went on blaming everyone else about the accident.
We went in with her to get a report to give to our insurance company. I told her I also wanted her regional managers phone number because I wanted to speak with the manager about her rudeness. She said to me “I’m sorry you thought I was being rude, there’s no need to call”. What kind of appology is that? She’s blaming me for misunderstanding her rudeness? I think not! I then insisted that she give me the number. My husband asked to use her phone to call the police to make an accident report. She told him that she had no phone for him to use. No phone, I questioned her. Then she said that the phone wouldn’t reach the counter. sigh we were getting no where with her so we left.
We called our insurance company when we got home. I then called the number that she gave me for her regional manager. Guess what…it was out of service. So I called her back and asked her for the real number. She then told me that the regional manager had moved and she didn’t have her new number. I then asked for the head company’s phone number. She said she didn’t have it. How can the store manager not have a head office number? She then told me that there was no need for me to call anyone as she would be calling and telling them her story. In other words, she’ll be telling them lies.
Oh my…this has gotten long, sorry about that!
Anyway, I’m with you on your drive-thru hatred!
I don’t mind being charged a minimal amount for a cup of water, but it totally pisses me off to be charged the same as I would for a soda and be told, “You’re paying for the CUP.” Oh, then if I bring my own cup from home, can I get a free drink? Hell, no! My brother ticked off a fast food worker by asking this very question. Look, either you’re paying for the drink or you’re paying for the cup, or a combination of both. I realize that cups cost money, so I don’t mind a small charge, as I said before. But don’t say that the entire cost of the drink is due to the cup, because it just ain’t so!
Oh, and may giant condors crap on top of all fast food places that have started selling bottled water ONLY, thereby refusing to allow anyone to save a single DIME on the cost of their meals. Just because someone doesn’t have a lot of money doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be able to eat out once in a while and still economize. You know–go out and eat a burger from the dollar menu and have water–but no. NOW they want to charge you a buck or more so they don’t lose so much as a penny. (Before anyone starts on me, no, I’m not talking about myself here).
I’ve worked drive-thru and the biggest complaint I had was when I couldn’t tell if someone wanted fries or if they wanted Sprite. Over the intercom, these two items sound remarkably alike, especially when the customer has a small voice or a heavy accent. Finally, I would have to say, “Do you want potatoes, or a 7-Up?”
Here’s something that really annoyed me at McDonalds during one of my visits. I order some pancakes and a drink. Pretty simple order. I get to the window and pay and then they tell me “Could you please pull forward. We’ll bring your order out in just a minute.”. Now, this isn’t normally a problem for me when the place is busy and there are a bunch of cars behind me. But on this day, there was nobody behind me. I asked politely why I had to move forward? The response was “Sir, would you please just move forward”. “No”, I told them. My reason?
I happened to work for a company that programmed the computer chips that go inside the little boxes that time how long a car is at the window. I’ve seen them many times and know what they look like and how they operate. I told the manager (who was also trying to get me to go to the little parking space) that he just wanted me to pull out of the way because I was being timed." I was told " Sir, we don’t time cars in the drive-through". I pointed to the little box that was clearly visible and said “What does that box do?” At this point, he basically threw my bag of food at me after being caught in a lie.
I proceeded to contact the owner of the restaurant and explain this little exchange. The owner was very apologetic and stated that his employees are not supposed to pull cars forward, simply to make their numbers look better. He offerred me a free breakfast if I would return the next day and it was served to me by the same manager who threw the bag at me the day before. If looks could kill…
In hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have been so obstinate but I saw no reason to make their numbers look like they were more efficient than they were. That isn’t my problem and I shouldn’t have to wait in some friggin parking space so that my cold food can be brought out 5 minutes later. There was nobody behind me in line so they weren’t busy enough to warrent getting all huffy because they couldn’t beat the clock.
Also, I can’t believe that Jack in the Box is the only place smart enough to realize that if you don’t want people delaying the line, because they don’t know what to order, put up another menu for them to look at before they get to the ordering window. Is is that hard to figure out?
No it isn’t. Not even in the O&T.
Andfor counter, the order: Cold drinks, parfaits, milkshakes, hot drinks, salads/entrees, cookies, pies,fries, ice cream.
“What’s the matter Colonel Sanders?.. Chicken?”
On a (slightly) more serious note, the thing that bothers me about drive-through windows is that they shouldn’t be called “drive-throughs”. Every drive-through I have ever used has been on the outside of the restaurant, making it (technically) a drive-BY. Now, a real drive-THROUGH resaurant would be really cool…
They are probably saying “jo-jos”, which is a term in Montana (and probably other western states as well) for…you guessed it, potato wedges. It’s not their fault that KFC goes with the more generic term–heck, the kid at the KFC at home knows what they mean by jojos, why don’t you? 
Now you know. Glad to fight a little ignorance for ya.
Fast food sidebar:
Cute product names - I hate 'em!!
A few years ago, Burger King had a hot ham and cheese sandwich. The best thing on their menu, but they called it the YUMBO! :smack:
Join seal_cleaner as he orders one.
seal "I’d like, uh, the hot ham and cheese.
BK kid: “Excuse me sir?”
seal: "Uhh, hot ham and cheese.
BK Kid: "Oh, you mean theYUMBO!
seal: "Uh, no…never mind… (wanders off in shame)
As long as we’re talkin’ fast food…
It seems to me that the reason that fast food exists is so that a customer can expect to not wait for a half an hour to get their food (like, say, in a real restaurant), and get it cheaper.
I got news for ya folks: If it takes you a half an hour to order for your ten-person family and they all want a specialty burger with no ketchup or no bun, don’t show up at the window all huffy when it takes 15 minutes for them to bring your order. If you’re really in that much of a hurry, perhaps you should skip the meal entirely and wait until you can get something that hasn’t been inundated with pesticides, carcinogens, and blood from the oppressed people that work for the giant conglomo corporations that process the “food” you scarf down (most likely), daily.
Go inside to order. Or go somewhere else. Or go to hell 
There. Now Pit me about how the economy would go to shit if the fast food business went belly up.