My Entry: Would You Like Meat With That?

Hello guys, this is my third post to a forum since starting here. I work at McDonald's and you can only imagine some of the things I have heard and experienced while working.

         A. Sausage McMuffin. Sounds simple right? It is precisely a buttered, toasted muffin with cheese and sausage. Why does it matter you ask? Because we have a Sausage McMuffin with Egg. Now you don't think this would be very confusing, but you will be amazed at the confusion this causes when eight Sausage McMuffins are ordered and they really want seven Sausage McMuffins with Egg and one Sausage McMuffin. Pricing is also different, the egg really does make a difference in price, and people really do think a Sausage McMuffin with egg is cheaper than a Sausage McMuffin.

         B. Sausage Biscuit. A buttered biscuit with sausage, no cheese. An amazing amount of people order this little item and say: "Please leave off the cheese" It happened just today actually. Then of course, like the Sausage Mcmuffin, it has an egg counterpart that gets confused in price. Also, there is the Great Cheese Debate. Many think cheese comes on everything with no cost. I would like to take the time to remind folks the price of milk products is staggering, especially in my line of work where every scrap of cheese waste is counted. (It is hard to count when it is melted together too.)

         C. Egg McMuffin. A buttered, toasted muffin with cheese, canadian bacon, and egg. Most people have an easy time with this all time favorite. What is asked for sometimes can baffle the most dedicated crew member. No one can order this item right, it is one of the oldest sandwiches we have. It has Canadian bacon which most of us know is equivalent to ham, so it is ordered as ham. This would be easy to look over except at one point our store sold bagels that had real ham on them so Canadian bacon had to be specified. But most people don't care about this and order blindly. Below are some samples of orders I hear in the drive-thru

1. "Sausage Muffin with Egg and Cheese and Bacon with no sausage"

2. "Sausage Biscuit with cheese on a Muffin"

3. "Egg McMuffin with sausage and no ham"

4. "Sausage Biscuit egg and cheese without a muffin"

5. " I want that muffin that has sausage and bacon no egg and cheese" (what is that?)

My time with McDonalds has made me train any and all family members in proper drive thru etiquette and ordering procedures. But sometimes it isn't the food ordered, it is the time of day. We serve breakfast from 6am-1030am Monday-Friday and 6am-11am on Saturday and Sunday. Pretty simple right? Nooo. The little town I work in has some pretty peculiar regulars. At 7:30am we have customers asking for lunch and at 3:30pm asking for breakfast. But our biggest hang up is the weekend thing. We'll get most of our customers accustomed to the weekday schedule, then saturday hits and mass confusion attacks the entire Kitsap Peninsula. Promptly at 10:30am people will order lunch and then get angry, and drive off or curse. Some even refuse to leave the drive-thru, then when the line finally progresses, and someone does order breakfast, it's lunch time. Yup. That's what I live with. It isn't funny when it's happening, but boy do I get a chuckle when I read my daily journals from a few weeks back. The antics that we simple folk go through for food at convenience. Convenient for whom is what I ask.