Dolts In The Drive-Thru
It’s a small thing, ordering a coffee at a drive-thru. It’s not life-altering if the order-taker gets it wrong but it is darn annoying.
I’ve been ordering our coffees the same way for – what? – 12+ years now, and it hasn’t been much of a problem. This morning, I gave the woman the usual: 2 large coffees, one just cream, one just milk. Simple, right? She handed me the coffees and they were both marked “C M”. I was amused! I had to ask because, given the order, the standard routine is to mark one “C” and one “M” so we can, you know, tell which is which. So I asked. The answer? “It’s what you ordered: one cream and one milk in each!” Uh, no honey. But it struck us as so funny we said, OK, what we meant was…. and waved off her attempt to give us new coffees. We told her it was alright and carried on. But you have to wonder what happened in her head to jumble all of that together and end up with such a weird order and may I also say, some pretty weird tasting coffee.
A west end Hamilton drive-thru person and I argued over my order one time and although I choked back the true extent of my frustration, her obstinance made me want to take a tire iron to her headset. I’d order “Milk only” and she’d say back to me “double milk.” I said, “no, I didn’t say DOUBLE, I said ‘milk only’ please.” She’d say, OK, here’s your double milk! I actually became the prick who held up the line trying to find out what was going inside that little pin head of hers that made her hear “double milk” when I said “milk”.
Two things became clear. First, that she thought she knew better than me what I wanted. Second, that she believed to her core that the colour of the coffee with milk in it, had to end up the same shade as the colour of coffee with cream in it. This was an unshakeable part of her being as a Tim Hortons drive-thru employee! So what I finally got out of her was that she was putting double milk into every milk order, to comply with some sort of inner voice that required her to make all coffees the same hue. No matter that that’s what I didn’t want and that it took a quarter of a cup of milk to reach her goal, rendering the coffee lukewarm and less enjoyable. I said “milk”, she heard “double milk”. It was infuriating!
I stopped going to that drive-thru for a few weeks until natural selection took its course and she was replaced by fresh meat at the window. I can only imagine that a fellow “milk only” fan snapped and beat her senseless with a stir stick.
