Commentary: Would You Like Your Whole Order With That?

You know the feeling. We’ve all been there. The alarm clock refused to quit waking you up this morning, no matter how many times you hit the snooze button. Rushing to work, you decide to skip breakfast, thinking, I’ll eat a healthful lunch.

Lunchtime rolls around, and your desk is piled high with work. Your stomach growls, and those mints on the edge of your desk begin to look as though they are small, breath-freshening cheeseburgers, begging to be eaten. Deciding to sacrifice lunch for the satisfaction of a clean desk at the end of the day, you gnaw on mints and the occasional fingernail.

Finally, the workday ends, and you hop in your vehicle, fatigued, void of energy, and you feel as much like making dinner tonight as you did like making breakfast this morning. Then the answer hits you — fast-food, that delicious, mouth-watering delicacy only truly appreciated by the most American of Americans. Genius! You’ll get a satisfying meal (finally!) without the hassle and exertion of going to the grocery store and of cooking dinner.

You pull into Taco Bell’s drive-thru lane up to the giant talking menu.

“Welcome to Taco Bell, how are you today?” the mysterious, static voice inquires.

You respond with a “fine,” wondering whether to return the pleasantry, wondering how much extra time that process will take, and wondering mostly about why the employee asked you such an unimportant question when all you really want them to ask for is your order.

After placing your order — and confirming it twice, just to be sure they don’t mess it up this time — you pull around to pay and pick up your order. While waiting for the fast-food employee (usually the one with the greasiest-looking hair, the one who just coughed on his or her hand, and/or the one who is disgruntled enough to invoke concerns about what he or she may have done to your food when you weren’t watching), your imagination proceeds to create the ever-closer fiesta platter (or whatever you ordered) in your mind.

There’s your meal, floating above you in the car, somewhere between consciousness and nirvana, the cheese melting out the sides of your quesadilla, warm and inviting. The scrumptious sauces drip onto your tongue, tasty and zesty. The soft, crunchy heat of a tortilla brushes your lips, and the marinated, juicy chicken and steak bits virtually dissolve in your mouth. The cool sting of a carbonated beverage rushes down the back of your throat, satisfyingly quenching your thirst and washing the enjoyable meal down.

Snap! The drive-thru window just slammed open, brining you back into reality. The worker, every even slightly liquefied substance available at the restaurant staining his or her shirt, asks for your money, probably not the same amount they told you back at the Wizard-of-Oz menu. Once the transaction is complete, the bag of food comes flying out the window into yours, the contents rolling upside-down.

You don’t care — you’re starving, and your mind goes back to that moment from before, causing your taste buds to salivate and your stomach to whimper.  Not a mile down the road, you can’t take it any longer. A day’s worth of not eating has finally met its match — the smell of taco, wafting though your nostrils like a thick morning fog over a plateau.

This is the moment! You reach into the plastic bag, realizing the worker forgot to include a straw, napkins or an eating utensil. You brush this off as a minor inconvenience, pushing aside the tortilla chips and the side of rice, moving the taco to the center console.

As you attempt to not hit a hippie bicycling down the bike lane (why can’t they just use the freaking sidewalk?), you frantically turn the bag upside-down (thus reverting everything to its normal position before the fast-food employee hurled the bag into your car).

No quesadilla! It’s not there! Your stomach is in knots, your blood pressure rises, and the expletives begin to flow like milk into the bowl of cereal you should’ve eaten this morning. The anticlimactic moment makes you lose your appetite, distraught with the disappointment you face, angry with the typical fast-food employees who can’t do their jobs.

And here is the point — people who are not too proud to work in fast food to support their families deserve respect. Anyone who has worked in the industry will tell you that it’s physically demanding work — but it isn’t rocket science. When we, the ever-fattening consumers, place an order, we expect it to be correct. When you, the fast-food worker, repeat our order verbatim to us, we expect you to actually put all of those items in the bag — and when we say no mayo, we mean no mayo (no, printing it on the receipt does not suffice)!

You have one job, fast-food worker — put everything we order in a bag via a sanitary, friendly method. Would you let us get away with it if we forgot to hand you half our money?

Joshua DeLung can be contacted at joshuadelung@gmail.com.

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