More about Mickey D's

It occurs to me to explain what has led me to my current position of Drive-up Nazi. When I was a kid, my family used to order food at the drive-thru window occasionally. We didn’t follow the guidelines I helpfully laid out in the last post. We didn’t try to figure out what we wanted BEFORE we pulled up to the speaker. To the rest of my family, the fact that they were going to have to choose a food item from the menu often appeared to come as a complete surprise.
This is how it went:

Okay… Hi. Um, we’d like… Honey, what do you want? Okay, a hamburger, with… no, a cheeseburger, with extra ketchup… and fries. What comes on the hamburger? Okay, make it no onions. And make the fries large. And a medium Coke. Teddie, what do *you* want? Well, they have hamburgers and hot dogs and French fries… Okay, a hamburger. You want it plain? Yeah, make that hamburger plain. Yeah, plain, just the meat and the bun. So, a cheeseburger, and a plain hamburger. No, just one cheeseburger, and one plain hamburger. What did you want to drink, Ted? And an orange drink, small. Wait, no, medium. And a medium order of French fries. Can we change that first cheeseburger to a double burger? Yeah, and onion rings instead of fries. Okay, Bryan, what do you want?

It's too painful to go through the rest. By the time we'd gotten thru the above, we’d only ordered for two people out of six, and the poor sucker taking the order already had no idea which hamburger is changed to a double, what’s ON the hamburger(s), how many orders of fries there are in what size, or his own name, probably. Our orders would’ve defeated the president of MENSA, and most of the people working at the drive-up window did not seem to be the president of MENSA. They never got it right, and I didn't blame them a bit. After we got our order, we would pull ahead and go through a hamburger-sorting extravaganza, with tears from the smaller ones when they discovered they had gotten extra mustard instead of no mustard, or perhaps their hamburger wasn’t even included in the order. Then Mom or Dad would go back in and get everything straightened out, and the whole thing would take about the same amount of time as raising and butchering our own beef at home. And I would sit in the back seat and cringe and squirm with embarrassment and frustration, and vow never to go through this with my own family.
So now I make my own kids figure out their order before we get into line, and mock and berate them unmercifully if they stutter or hesitate while giving it to me. And believe me, they way I make the drive-up experience – and their lives in general – miserable, they tend to stutter a lot...