Can I ask what you mean by the word “plain” in the above? To me, asking for a “plain” sandwitch would me you don’t want any condiments or veggies. But, you go on to add specific condiments - so it isn’t “plain” at all.
I’m not a fast food worker, but this would confuse me.
Mum says he went absolutely off his rocker mental and called for the manager.
The manager, a grandiose ex-RAF chappie duly arrived and asked about the complaint.
Upon hearing it he was most perturbed and inquired politely just how the gentleman would like his chips, as the management were at great pains to provide the customer with absolutely everything they might require from such a high class establishment.
No answer was forthcoming, save a string of invective and abuse and the manager said that he would politely request the gentleman to desist from such unbecoming language in an establishment of their calibre and if the gentleman could not restrain himself, he, the manager would, regretfully have to ask him, the gentleman, to leave. If the gentleman’s party wished to leave, then so be it, although they were of course, most welcome to stay.
The gentleman left.
I recently caused a little stir at my local McD’s, but I have to say in my own defense that it was God’s - or at least the Pope’s - fault. I was running early for work and I was hungry so I decided to stop in and get myself some breakfast …
rockle: Hi, I’d two Egg McMuffins with no meat please.
cashier: OK, sure, that will be <whatever the price was>.
Two minute pause, while I pay the cashier and the manager comes running out from “back there.”
manager: I’m sorry, did you order the Egg McMuffins with no meat?
rockle: Yes, I did.
manager: But you can’t have the Egg McMuffins with no meat. They come with meat.
rockle: I know, but it’s Friday and it’s Lent and I can’t have any meat today.
manager: But they come with meat.
rockle: That’s fine, just give them to me with meat and I will take the meat off, no problem.
manager: But you can’t do that, ma’am. They come with meat.
Another pause. I hate being called ma’am - my mother in law is ma’am. I am too young to be a “ma’am,” and I don’t run a brothel. Please, just call me rockle! But this guy doesn’t know my name is rockle, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt. I am just hungry and I want my food.
rockle: OK, that’s fine. Just give me the two Egg McMuffins, then.
manager: No problem, just a minute.
I wait another minute, and I hear something going on “back there.” I check the clock and realize that now I am a bit behind schedule, so I will have to speed even more than usual to get to work on time. Then, surprisingly, the manager comes back out from “back there.”
manager: I’m sorry, ma’am, but you said you can’t have meat.
rockle: Uh … yes, because it’s Friday and it’s Lent.
manager: Well, then, I’m sorry, but I can’t sell you any Egg McMuffins, they come with meat.
cashier: But she already paid for them …
rockle: Uh … yeah … I already paid for them.
manager: Well, if you like, I can exchange your Egg McMuffins for something that doesn’t have meat in it.
At this point I am extremely confused, because if they had just sold me what I wanted in the first place, then I wouldn’t have gotten any meat.
rockle: Um, OK, what can you give me instead?
manager: Well, we have bagel sandwiches … oh, but they have meat too. We have hotca … oh, but they come with sausages. Um … well … we have fish sandwiches.
It is 7:00 in the morning and at this point I just do not give a wet rat’s ass any more. I am hungry and I need to go to work so I don’t get fired.
rockle: OK, then I will have two fish sandwiches, please.
manager: I’m sorry, we don’t serve lunch items until 11:00.
I didn’t even ask for my money back. I just left and chalked the whole thing up to experience and stopped going to Church.
That is…surreal.
I’m a big club sandwich fan. A few diner-type take away places around here offer it on the menu. I always ask for mayo. They give me a little container of mayo on the side.
So next time, I ask for mayo ON THE SANDWICH. “We don’t do that,” I’m informed.
I ask you, what’s easier? Spreading a little mayo on one slice of toast before slapping it on the top of the sandwich, or me taking apart the sandwich (which is usually held together with toothpicks, and already cut into quarters) and spreading it on myself - when they haven’t given me a plastic knife?
A waitress at a local sit-in I frequent has taken on the task admirably. She knows me from frequent visits, and applies the mayo herself before bringing me my order. I give her good tips. She deserves sainthood.
Actually, it’s not confusing at Burger King at all. To order the above, the drone would push the following buttons on his/her automatic cash register in this order:
[ul]
[li]WHPR[/li][li]CHS[/li][li]PLAIN[/li][li]MAYO[/li][li]LTCE[/li][li]TMTO[/li][/ul]
If they don’t push the Plain button, the guys in the back just put on extra mayo lettuce and tomato.
Clear as mud? I never worked there, but I’ve been in enough of them and I’m just nosy enough to see how they do it so I can get what I want, almost every time.
I’ve never ever had a problem with speical orders. 'Course, I don’t do them that often, but when I do, here’s the procedure:
The goal, I think, is to snap folks out of their robotic punch-the-register-number trance. Get them to acknowledge you as a person; acknowledge them as a person. Make it seem like they’re doing you a personal favor, and be super-grateful to them for the favor. Use sentences whose meanings are unambiguous and redundant, so that even if they mis-hear or misinterpret one word, they’ll still get the message.
In the short term, it’s not as efficient as saying, “Give me a fish, no tartar.” In the long run, I don’t ever have to take my order back.
Daniel
Dan:
I have to confess to a similar tactic. Mine however is not honorable and forthright.
If I want a tunafish sandwich tomatos, I will say that, and then I will say "I am highly allergic to tomatos. Could you please make sure there are no tomatos on my sandwich. If a tomato even touches my sandwiches, I will likely go into anaphyletic shock (I have no idea what that means,) my throat will close up, I may suffocate and die.
Please make sure they don’t put tomatos on my sandwich"
It works every time.
Don’t think ill of me.
Hey, whatever works.
Although if I were you, I wouldn’t start off with:
No sense getting off on the wrong foot, y’know? 
Daniel
Went to a Burger King once with my Uncle Mark. When he saw the guy working behind the counter, he was like, “Oh God, that guy. He has never once got my order right.” So we proceed to the register, and Mark says, “I’d like a Whopper with cheese and could you put some BBQ sauce on that too?”
The guy says, “Sure. That’s a Whopper with cheese and BBQ sauce.”
Mark says, “Well, I want everything else on the Whopper too, just with extra BBQ sauce.”
The guy looks confused but punches some buttons. Mark makes a tactical error in not asking the guy to repeat the order back. We move down the counter to wait for our food.
The Whopper arrives, and looks like it’s about a foot tall. Seriously, this was the largest fast food sandwich I have ever seen. Mark unwraps it, and condiments fall out all over the place. This thing was JAMMED with condiments. It looked like someone had made a small salad on top of the burger. Mark looks at the receipt, which shows that the dude working behind the counter had punched in “Whopper with cheese, BBQ sauce, and extra everything.”
McDonalds has pretty much eliminated my food options there. I’m a vegetarian, so that presents some problems, but I always figured I could at least have fries, right? Bzzt. Turns out they soak their fries in beef juices during processing (and settled a couple lawsuits over not mentioning that) - here I thought the mild gastric distress I experienced after eating them was maybe from too much fried food.
I liked their big cup of yogurt and berries. Well, with their new Dollar Menu, now the big cup of yogurt and berries is tiny, and ordering two or more is a pain and pricey.
Salads? Well, since they moved from their salad in a broad dish to the “shaker” salad, for some reason the salad has tasted horrible. Plus it’s so inconvenient - trying to pour the salad dressing into the tall cup and shake it up is difficult, and for some reason the greens seem to be really limp and lifeless. Ew. If you’re going to subject me to rabbit food, make it taste good at least. But wait - now they have new gourmet salads, and they’re back to a dish! Right, and all of them have chicken on them, or if you don’t like that, how about chicken and bacon? :smack: Their website claims to have a couple of non-chicken gourmet salads, but I’ve never seen them offered in the McDonalds that I’ve gone to (my husband still eats there and I scan the menu to see if there’s anything I can eat).
Soup! Oh thank goodness, broccoli cheese soup. But their website nutritional info section doesn’t list any soup at all, so I can’t tell if they slipped any “beef juices” or anything into it. And a few times that I’ve ordered it, I’ve gotten a mix of it with clam chowder - ew! Apparently someone’s too lazy to fully clean out one cream soup type before filling the pot with another.
My husband likes them, though, and he often gets the smart cashiers who rearrange his multi-burger/fries/soda orders into a form that saves him the most money (he supersizes the other stuff anyway, so they know enough to just charge him for a value meal for part of it), so it works out for him at least.
FUCK your precious little special orders. Just eat something out of the bin and shut the fuck up, you whiney fuck!
Now say Amen to that
[sub]amen**
Ye gods.
But not surprising.
Ah, a “plain” button - never would have figured that.
Next time, I might try to order an empty cup, with coffee, black, and some cream. Maybe that will work.
There’s a Wendy’s in my neighborhood that never gets my order right. I have considered driving up to the window and saying, “Hey, I got about 20 bucks, and want to feed four people. You know, burgers, fries, nuggets, drinks, whatever. Just give it your best shot.”
After all these stories about incompetent cashiers, I want to highlight two places where I’ve always got excellent service.
There’s a McDonald’s about a block from my house. I don’t go there more than once or twice a month, but I’ve lived here for close to fifteen years, and they never, ever screw up my complicated and picky special orders. Never. The night manager knows me by name and makes a point of telling me about her daughter she’s putting through law school by working at McD’s.
There’s also a local deli (non-chain) that I go to on my lunch break from work. Little Louie’s. They get a lot of lunch business from the local Chevron refinery, so the place is pretty hectic, and they often give me the wrong sandwich. But whenever they do, they always remember it the next day and give me my sandwich for free. And the food’s so good there, I usually don’t mind when I get the wrong one anyway.
There’s a Wendy’s in my neighborhood that never gets my order right. I have considered driving up to the window and saying, “Hey, I got about 20 bucks, and want to feed four people. You know, burgers, fries, nuggets, drinks, whatever. Just give it your best shot.”
Brilliant! Let me know how it works!
As somebody who works in one arm of the food assembly industry (what you get at fast-food places is more assembled than cooked), I’d like to come in for the people who have to make your order.
For example, I work at a certain well-known pizza chain whose name and corporate logo reference an age-old game stereotypically played by old men in front of old-timey general stores in the south. The entire operation is designed upon the assumption that everyone who works there is going to be a total idiot. There is a standard procedure for everything, and woe betide you if you deviate from it. If you call up and say, “I’d like to order a large pepperoni pizza and that’s it,” I am <i>required</i> to waste your time and mine regaling you with a list of side orders that you’ve already said you don’t want. I am then also required to ask you if you want anything to drink, even though you’ve told me you don’t.
“Secret shopper” callers from corporate HQ will actually call in and do this to try and bust me (which then screws with the “rating” for the whole store and everyone who works there) for not offering all this crap. Sadly, they’re not entirely unjustified: often customers who’ve said “that’s it” <i>will</i> actually change their minds and get side orders and/or beverages.
Although the burger or taco businesses are probably different, I strongly suspect that everyone making a burger has a set of signs, probably including pictures, telling them what goes on what, so that a kid who was hired this morning can be making 80 burgers an hour by lunch. He sees “Whopper,” he’s got about 15 seconds to put it together, and he follows his sign. Your special request, as the Brits say, bungs a spanner in the works. It’s not surprising that you often don’t get it. The system just isn’t designed for orders that deviate from whatever standard has been decreed for that item.
If the people who make the rules at Burger King or Denny’s would pay salaries that might keep employees around long enough to learn their jobs, or would provide sufficient staff such that every employee had time to think about your order without being harried and rushed, you’d probably get your special order right more often. But that would cost more, and you’d pay more for your burger.
Or, to be considerably more succinct: when you’re paying 99 cents a burger, you can’t really expect it to be a lovingly-crafted, personalized-just-for-you work of art.
Just do what I do: order the cheeseburger and take off the damned pickle yourself. It ain’t that hard, and you get your food faster.
“There isn’t any L or T on my BLT!” (That was me at age 8 on a family vacation; Mom loves to quote my complaint after the restaurant gave me a bacon sandwich without the veggies by mistake.)
Unless you are fortunate enough to be in a city with an American chain restaurant like Pizza Hut, beware of ordering “pepperoni” on a pizza in Sweden. Swedes use the word to mean whole, extremely hot peppers…as I found out the hard way when asking a friend to bring back a take-out pizza. (Rough translation of my reaction: “Johan, what the [bleep] is THIS doing here?!?”)