Intelligent design

About once a day when I work in drive-thru, I get someone who almost drives pass my window, and probably would if I didn't holler "hello!" at them. Often then, they'll comment on the poor design of the drive-thru. I mean... heh, looks like I'm going to have to do some exposition.

There are three ways to enter the parking lot at my McDonald's. Two of them can get you to drive-thru easily, but one other makes you circle the building so you can order. Also, you can't see the window that I work at from very far down the line, because it's around a corner. Besides the window I often work at and the window where the food is handed out, there's another window. We have it covered by a curtain, but sometimes people still stop there and I'll have to hang out the window to wave them down.

The poor design of this McDonald's is not merely relegated to the exterior; it also has quite a bit of wasted space, not much storage, a grill that is too small of the volume of business we do, and my personal favorite, only one stall in the women's bathroom. In fairness, there's only one in the men's too, but they also have a urinal. It was built on a crawl space rather than a foundation, and there are cracks in the floor if you look closely. And, the dining room is too small. I say, jokingly, that this McDonald's is evidence that there is no such thing as intelligent design. And the owner agrees with me. He's having it torn down and rebuilt like a "normal" McDonald's.

Hey, Mr. Owner, be sure not to give the contract for designing this place to the same company that give you this shitty design in the first place, mmmkay?

Chances are, it'll still be closed when I graduate from boot camp. It'll make things nice and complicated when the Navy guys show up to interview my superiors and coworkers for my security clearance and find a building site. Heh. I might spend a month or two doing more shit jobs because they can't easily find people to interview.

Drive-through ettiquette

I think that there are quite a few people that are inadvertently rude while giving their orders in drive-through. Some suggestions seem to be common sense, others are less so.

1. Diction. Seriously, there are times when I can barely understand customers for lack of diction. Ive changed "Hi-C" into "Iced Tea," and on one occasion, a small sprite became a small fry. And speak slowly! Over the intercom, speaking too quickly is one of the best things you can do to damage your understandability. Slow down, and make your consonants crisp, please.

2. Have an idea of what you want before your start ordering. Even if it's vague, I can list the choices we have in that category. Say, you want a salad though you're not sure what kinds the store offers or what's in them; a good drive-through order-taker should be able to describe the different kinds of salad fairly quickly. Don't get me wrong, I know that sometimes you need to look at the menu board to see the prices or narrow your decision, but please, don't sit in drive through looking at the menu board for more than a minute or so.

3. Turn your windshield wipers down if it's raining. This isn't obvious, but when your windshield wipers are on high, often they'll throw the water off of your windshield and onto whoever happens to be next to you. It sucks working in drive-through when it's raining just because of this.

4. Please don't yell. Try to speak in a calm, low tone. Even though the volume is up on the speaker outside, you don't need to match its volume for me to hear you. Speaking voice is good, if you know command voice, that is better. Screaming and shouting aren't good.

5. If it takes you more than thirty seconds to find exact change, don't bother. Exact change is nice, but celerity is better. If you have pennies to make it to the next quarter, dime, or nickel, that's more than adequate. Also, if you want to pay exclusively in change, please don't come at lunchtime or around 8 in the morning, because chances are, there will be a line at least three cars long behind you. Ideally, we're supposed to go from order to handing the food to you in less than 90 seconds, and giving me five dollars in mixed change at lunch is more than just annoying. It's going to take you and those other people that much longer to get to the food.

6. This is a personal preference, but if you're going to thank your order taker while at the speaker, say "thanks" rather than "thank you." Over the speaker, "thank you" sounds like "fuck you."

I may think of more later. I just want to put this out there, for contemplation's sake.

Suicide is not painless

At work the day before yesterday, I dropped a glass coffee pot and it shattered on the edge of a shelf, causing an impressive amount of glass shrapnel. I'm lucky, I guess; I stepped back and put my arms up, so rather than getting a face full of glass, I only have a series of mostly minor cuts on my arms. Most of them are shallow, a few are deeper, and a couple of them are longer than the others.

There's a cut on my left wrist that didn't even go all the way through my skin, but it's fairly long, so that gets three stitches. One on my right elbow, although not as long, was quite a bit deeper; it even had some arterial spurt action going on before the bleeding stopped. It got one stitch.

Of all the cuts, I find these two to be the most interesting and oppositional. The one on my wrist looks like a lame suicide attempt. It hardly bled at all, and I don't know why they felt it needed some help getting back together. And why'd they use stitches? It's shallow enough to use superglue. However, because of its location, and not so much its severity, it gets the most attention from my superiors and crewmates. Great. I'll have a scar on my wrist the rest of my life.

The one on my elbow, though, was bloodier and messier than the one on my wrist, but it got less attention because, I suppose, people don't normally try to kill themselves by cutting their elbows. Maybe this'll start a new trend.

Anyway, I'm in a bit of pain. I think I'll leave it at that.

Incompentence

I'm going to be blatant. The store manager at the McDonald's I work for is ultimately incompetent.
I don't mean she's a bad person. Personally, I rather like her. Nor do I mean that she is mentally impaired in some way. She just doesn't have the skills to run the store well, and if left to her own devices (that is, some of the shift managers stopped supporting her and telling her what to do), it would be a likely disaster. And sometimes it is a disaster, even if she is supported.

One of the Point-of-Sale computers (POS, sometimes we call them pieces of shit) had been malfunctioning. Instead of calling in the problem directly, she stuck a note on it, "don't use this." I wonder, did she think it was going to go away? Anyway, I was pushing a bit for her to call it in right now, so if we needed to do a system reset, it would be at 5 in the morning. She was unsure, and so she waited for a more competent manager to come in and weigh the situation.

Unfortunately, the next manager didn't come in until 8am. They agreed that yes, they needed to call this in, and as it turned out, they did need to do a system reset.

Oh, that sucked. System resets take at least 45 minutes, and according to the franchise rules, we weren't allowed to close for this. So for about an hour, we were taking orders by hand, figuring out the seven percent tax, keeping a log of what was ordered. During what's usually a busy breakfast hour.

It wasn't as bad as it could've been. I was given the task of taking orders and figuring the prices for drive thru. I've paid enough attention that I know most of the menu items' prices including tax, but there were a couple times where I had to compute the 7%. I'm sure I got something wrong during that hour, but generally things (at least from my perspective) went about as smoothly as you could hope for.

Judging by my coworkers, though, it could've been a disaster. One girl insisted on having a calculator for finding the change. Another gave out free things, and later got in trouble for it. One was amazed by the arithmetic that decorated my orders. To me, it's just simple math that I've had a lot of practice doing.

A manager is in a position of power and authority; however, without input from the people who are in their authority, it would be hard to have a grasp on what's really going on. It's a reciprocal kind of relationship, since a manager can't manage without talking to and considering the opinions of their "followers," and the "f0llowers" need an authority in order to function as a unit.

I learned all this at band camp. I have a feeling it will be reinforced at boot camp.