Ok… I live in MA. I have all my life. I know we have funny accents around here but I speak English fairly well. I majored in English in college. I speak no other language than English. Or I thought so anyway until I discovered that there is simply something wrong with how I order food at restaurants. It must be me because these last few months have been hell. Every place I go screws up my order.
Today I went to D’angelos. I ordered steak and cheese subs with teriyaki sauce. I get home to find no teriyaki sauce on my subs. I also ordered a kids meal that they totally zoned on and had to make for me after my other sandwiches were packed up and ready to go.
On the way home from the doctor’s a few days ago I pop into Wendy’s and grab lunch. I order a chicken nugget kids meal for the munchkin and get home to find a cheeseburger in the bag.
I’m having a war with the local Dunkin Donuts. They seem impaired in ways I never thought possible. I ask for lite cream cheese. 3 out of four times I get regular. They give me dirty looks when I rifle through the bag before leaving the counter and seem irritated when I ask them to switch the cream cheese. I also do not want my bagel toasted. I will toast it at home. This is nearly impossible for them to comprehend. ‘she owns a toaster?’ they seem to boggle at this concept. My poor hubby went one day to get himself a bagel sandwich and me a non toasted bagel and lite cream cheese. He came home with a sandwich that did not have a toasted bagel but my bagel was merrily toasted and had a little packet of regular cream cheese. They’re doing this on purpose… I swear!
Papa Gino’s sounded yummy one day so I ordered pizza, breadsticks and some fries for the munchkin. Then I let them talk me into trying some of their new cinna sticks. Well I got all the stuff home and unwrapped and I had 2 boxes of cinna sticks and no breadsticks.
I’m not against cooking and I do quite a bit of it. But right now with 3-4 hour doctor appointments and the trip in and out of Boston added to the time… you need to eat somewhere in there
I used to get this all the time, too. Things improved when McD’s got that visual screen thing at the drive thru. Now you can see the display of what you’re ordering so if they screw that up you can rectify it before they place the order. I don’t know if any other places are doing this but it seems like a good idea. Of course, if they’re screwing up this royally when you’re actually talking to them face-to-face, I don’t know how you can fix that! Maybe you speak too well and they don’t get it–time to stop dropping those r’s, not for nothin’.
Yea…that just makes up for the time they can get you in other ways.
I once ordered a cheeseburger in Mcdonalds while driving through Kentucky. I got a cheese bun with ketchup and everything…with no burger. I tried to comprehend the burger maker looking down at the bun and failing to realize that cheeseburger means ‘cheese+burger’. I mean sure, you are working at McDonalds but you can breathe and walk at the same time, I am assuming that a cheeseburger will come with the burger!
Oh, try getting extra sauce for Nuggets. EVERY TIME I have asked in different places, I get a look like I just half casually asked if I could have them drop trou, stick their ass through the hole and let me give them a Big Mac Suppository.
Which, come to think of it, is not a bad idea for some of them:D
Try the pure hell of ordering anything other than a medium coffee, double-double, at Tim Horton’s. In particular, try ordering the sandwich that they’ve been running commercials for, non-stop, for two weeks. You will discover that the only people in Canada who have not heard of said sandwich are the people who work at Tim Horton’s.
I long for the day when machines take over McDonalds and their ilk. They’ll be friendly, accurate, and prompt. The Matrix is looking better and better…
If machines can build cars, ferchrissakes, I think they can build burgers. Here’s how it should work.
I stride merrily into a Fast Food Restaurant of my choice. I saunter up to the friendly, touch screen display. Like they use at the movie theater I go to, actually. I peruse the menu, deciding on a double cheeseburger, plain, with a medium order of fries and a large chocolate shake. I press all these buttons on the handy menu. The machine spits out my total. I swipe my debit card.
Then some automated robot stuff happens and my order pops out, hot and ready to go.
tanookie - speaking from experience, it’s a Boston thing. I don’t know why, but somehow no fast food restaurant of any kind in this area is able to get a complete order right the first time. I have the same problem you do (esp. with the cream cheese switcharoo at Dunkin Donuts); however, I don’t have this problem once I leave MA.
Once, a friend of mine tried to get a vanilla coolata - four drinks later, she got the one she actually ordered. The “mistake drinks” included a mango coolata (which would be quite easy to mix up with french vanilla, i’m sure), and also a hazelnut (to which she is very allergic).
tanookie, I feel your pain, as another Mass resident. This also seemed to bother me much more when I was pregnant, when the mere sight of a botched order could send me into a fit of sobbing and wondering why,why, why me, Lord?
