Monday, November 13, 2006

What do the rivers of Heaven flow …?!

I have been sitting on this piece for a couple of months, because I was fearing I was going to be judged as spoiled and picky, but then I said: what the heck?! I am judged, I am sure, as a whole lot worse than that, so … I’ll send it out there!

This might have been just as well entitled “Angry and thirsty, stranded in the midst of America” – it would have been just ironic!
So, here I go:

Have you ever heard of or come across a fast food restaurant that “don’t have no water” for a drink with your meal?! No, no, nothing fancy: a glass of water, ice or not … a cup of ice, even, empty?! No. Not an option! They literally refuse to offer anything that comes in cup but is a different liquid or concoction other that the punch buttons on the cash machine tells them it needs to be! That restaurant is a “A&W restaurant”, and this particular challenged location I found in the Detroit, MI, airport. They don’t have bottled water, nor TAP water to be offered to the customers with their food. I guess their taps, over there at the “A&W” restaurant in Detroit, Mi, only provide root beer! I guess if they ever wash their hands in there, they must just make do with root beer, because you see, water is in such shortage there!

No, no, I cannot choose the option “no drink with my meal”, either! I am PAYING for the drink, thank you very much, while the person next in line GETS IT, since I don’t want any sodas or juices. No, I am paying $1.50 extra for my shitty sandwich, but if I choose not to drink it, SOMEBODY, by God, HAS to have it, because the little person at the cash register, HAS TO fill up a cup of SOMETHING for SOMEONE with this particular chicken sandwich … so the guy behind me gets a root beer AND a sprite – or something like that! Because “no drink” is not an option on the machine, either, you see; and they MUST punch SOMETHING in in order for the total to show up!

Next time when YOU hate YOUR job, think about this dilemma: dealing with a sorry ass picky damsel who cannot f*&^5ing pick a damn drink and cannot get you to the bottom line when you have 5 people waiting in line to order and missing planes left and right! Think about THAT, for a change, people! :-)

I am standing there, in awe, and I don’t want to be mean, but I wanna scream at the top of my lungs: “Use your brain, people! Someone put it in your head for SOME kind of reason! USE it, or else it’ll go stale! Just like that water on the tap pipe that is not released in my shitty cup right now! Wasted!”.

So, I order my sandwich – see, it’s in the computer, people are waiting, plane is leaving in 20 minutes, guilt trip – I am ordering, OK!!! But no water. Well, yeah, sprite, actually, for the person behind me. Me: no liquids! No, for that, you have to “go next door, ma’am, they has bottle water down there. Next door”. So, I am waiting for my sandwich, and going next door for another charge of $2 for a bottle of water, although I have paid $1.50 for a sprite that the person behind me is now drinking, out at the “A&W” joint!

I guess the little woman at the “A&W” counter was not trained to be faced with the picky bastards that by chance might order water instead of the sugary drinks – what an abomination, overweight America!!!!! Water? Geez!!! Who in the Heck orders Water in a fast food place nowadays?!? Who do you think we are, lady? MacDonald’s?! So, she didn’t know any better. Never in the whole training process was she ever told, even in passing, “use your common sense” or (pickier yet, Geez, Alina, who do you think you’re dealing with here, Homo Sapiens, by chance?!) “brain” – no… She was told: punch the buttons! Since the buttons don’t exist, make the damn picky bastard customer MAKE up her damn mind, or send them “next door”! Pretty simple!

I guess in the big wide world of Fast Food Heaven, out there at the “A&W” headquarters there are rivers of coke and sprite and root beer just flowing every day, uncontrollably! They’ve never heard of “water” up there at the corporate level of “A&W”. In the “next door” Heaven, however, at the bagel shop, it’s where they have the streams of water instead, and THEY afford to bottle it and sell it for $2 a piece, too! And satisfy the picky bastards over there, in that renegade Heaven! But not here, in this sugary, sweet one! No, ma’am! We don’t do water, or … empty for that matter! Up in here we just punch buttons! We can’t punch buttons that don’t exist, ma’am! There’s no way!

Man, and I was thinking I was coming home (I was coming from abroad on that sad trip which landed me in Detroit, MI for a brief hour or so) to the land of opportunities and all possibilities! I guess, in a way, and by some root beer-loving folks, I am doing JUST that!

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