Here's the day so far. The son has karate class at 9:30 in town and easy to get to even if parking is a problem. Karate class is an hour.

Daughter has theatre from 10:00 to 12:00 two towns and eight exits down the highway.

After dropping off the son, we usually get to theatre with time to wait for the director to arrive and open the doors. The it's back up the highway to karate. I do have enough time to stop at a Dunkin Donuts for coffee.

Now before the coffee snobs come down on me, let me tell you that I don't care. I have no need of a hand crafted low foam low fat concoction carefully prepared by a specially trained barrista. For the same money I can get a 24 oz cup of decent black coffee and be happy.

After getting the son at karate, we have an hour and a half to kill before theatre rehearsal is over. We do errands, we stop at the toy store. We take the post road to Norwalk instead of the thru-way. We don't want to get there too soon. The son does not like to wait.

When theatre is over we head out for lunch. The Saturday lunch of choice - Burger King. (Note: this is not my choice. It's what the kids want and I let them have it there way.) Their preferred seating is all the way in the back of the restaurant. I don't mind since it gives me a good view of the drive-up microphone.

There are very few people who will pull up to the mic, roll down their window, turn their head and order.

There is one group I call the Leaners. A Leaner will turn their whole torso to face the mic, hang one arm out the window and lean out to get as close to the mic as possible.

There's another group I have labeled Futile Gesturers. Along with standard talking hand motions an FG will often hold up fingers corresponding to a quantity of an item ordered. I have seen several FGs apparently pointing to items on the menu display as they order.

But those groups combined are probably only a third of the people I observed. (note I did not keep tabulated results so that may not be statistically accurate.) The vast majority of people will put one hand on their chin or at touch their face in some manner.

I have two theories for this. The first is that they are very focused on saying the exactly the right thing in exactly the right way. They want to remember that right after they order the double Whopper with bacon and cheese with the large fries that they want Diet Coke not regular. Because there is a certain finality to to the drive thru window. Once you drive off whatever you have is pretty much what you're going to eat. By the time you figure out that your Coke isn't diet it's really not worth going back. You'll just have to accept a few extra calories.

The other theory is that they are very self conscious about speaking into a microphone. Somewhere in the back of their minds they think that their order is being broadcast to the entire restaurant. It's public speaking and they are not at all comfortable.

Personally, I'm a bit of a leaner. How do you order drive thru?

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 01:29 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment