Fast Food (?)

I really must stop doing this. Going into fast food restaurants, I mean. Having to wait hours and hours and hours and then getting substandard crud which I will then go and moan about on my blog. Ho hum!!

This evening I went to my favourite (!) fast food joint in Mile Three with my nephew for a quick fill up. As usual, there were about half a million people queuing up to be served and, as usual, only two of the three counters were open.

As the late great Kurt Vonnegut might have said: So It Goes....

So, we were patiently waiting for the queue to crawl forward at a glacial pace when we encountered what is probably the most pointless 'customer service' phenomenon in the history of world food retailing. Let me explain.

Please nod if you have experienced this, gentle readers. You are stuck in a long slow queue behind people who can't make up their ****** minds what they want, or who are ordering enough food for a whole planeload of people and taking so ****** long about it. Suddenly, out of nowhere pops one of the restaurant's little red robots carrying a menu and a little pad in his hand.

The robot beeps and mumbles politely and asks you what you would like to order. You point at the menu, he gets it wrong several times, beeps and whirrs quite a bit, but eventually he ticks off your order on his little pad and tears off a slip for you to take to the counter.

So, thinking you will be served faster by doing this, you present the slip of paper to the server (when finally it's your turn of course!) The server asks you to go through the order again, laboriously repeating everything in loud, discordant broken English. Then you wait for your order to be prepared and you pay as normal.

Sounds good, doesn't it? But, don't you think that there is an element of redundancy there somewhere? I mean, call me a few bricks short of a full load, but it seems to me that you don't really need to have a little robot taking your order while you are waiting in the queue, only to have to present your order again to someone else later. Why doesn't the manager assign the little robot to operate the closed counter, so that the queue can be reduced more quickly?

My dear wife disagrees with me on this, of course. She tells me that the little robot's job is not redundant at all, because most people take such a long time to take their orders, dilly dallying about and chatting to each other etc, and therefore it is quicker to simply let them make their order in advance and present the little slip of paper to the counter.

Well, I'm not entirely convinced. But for the sake of marital bliss, I will reserve judgment for the time being.......