THEY F*** YOU AT THE DRIVE THRU...

Leaky paper bags; super-sized sandwiches perched on their side because the bag is too small to accommodate their width; a cardboard box placed unsealed and upside down in the sack, so that the sandwich falls apart when you try to pick it up; a salad with no eating utensils or salad dressing, placed upside down in the bag and the plastic lid only attached to one side. No worries about combining the ingredients, that will happen automatically when you try scooping it all up and putting it back in the container... from your lap… with your bare hands. On the bright side... at least it wasn’t hot soup. 

An overfilled soda or coffee cup, handed to you on an angle through the open car window. Liquid dripping down the side of the cup...pooling on top of the plastic lid... from that small hole... meant as a convenience for sipping on a hot drink without removing the lid... or as a place to insert the straw on a cold one. Don’t forget about the coffee or soda spewing out from that same hole like a geyser, because you gripped the sides of the cup too hard and it was filled to the brim. I think my favorite scenario, however, is the drink handed to you ever so gingerly. As soon as the handoff is complete... the lid not properly sealed around the lip of the cup in the first place... pops off and your drink runs down your sleeve and into the open car window.

Maybe you’ve gotten a disposable paper cup that leaks from its side seam... or the Styrofoam coffee cup with the ill-fitting lid or invisible pin hole that you can’t find no matter how hard you look for it. To the naked eye, everything looks fine and so, you pick it up to take a sip and it drips down the front of your shirt... or magically appears as a puddle on your desk. Okay, the leaky cups may not be the fault of the drive-thru…those are obviously manufacturing defects, but I’m on the fence about the ill-fitting lids. That should have been caught. It's happened to me more times than I can count. These are some of the joys I have experienced at drive-thru restaurants.

Today’s post centers around a trip to a popular fast-food establishment, which began like any other. I placed my order...a burger, fries and a diet soda. When I pulled up to the window and got my soda and the bag with my food, I didn’t examine it because I was in a hurry. When I got home about twenty minutes and fifteen miles later... I opened the bag only to discover my burger and fries had morphed into a fish sandwich dripping in tartar sauce... smeared on the outside of the box and all over the inside of the bag. My fries had been transformed into a side order of chocolate chip cookies, which were now dipped in the tartar sauce from the sandwich. Yum!!

I thought about making the trek back to the drive-thru to complain, but I was tired and hungry. I ended up making a frozen pizza. I decided that I would be able to heat it up in the same amount of time it would have taken me to go back to the restaurant; find a manager that may or may not have believed the error was theirs (or that the food was handed off as a sloppy mess.), just to possibly get a replacement meal. I did learn a valuable lesson though…always check the contents before leaving the drive-thru window and better still…eat at home!

At any rate, there’s a funny quotation from Lethal Weapon 2, that I’m using as the title of this post. In case you haven’t seen it before, I've attached a short clip from the film. As far as I'm concerned, more heartfelt words were never expressed so eloquently... at least that’s how I feel today. If you're easily offended by profanity, you might want to skip the clip...just saying. 😏

https://youtu.be/i9upvWNN3P8

Sources:   Movie clip courtesy of MovieClips.com Lethal Weapon 2 (4/10) Movie CLIP - At the Drive-Thru (1989) HD

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