Today while I was out and about, I started feeling a little peckish.  It was lunch-ish time, but I had a day full of errands ahead of me to get done, and didn’t want to sit too long for lunch.  I didn’t want to eat in my car either, though.  As I was considering my options, I saw a Burger King up ahead, and thought, well, I haven’t had fast food for a while, maybe I will try that.

When I walked in after parking the car, I saw that there were a number of young people hanging about the front counter.  I asked if anyone was in line?  No, they were all waiting for their orders to be ready.  OK, I said, and stepped up to the counter.

No one came to wait on me, for at least five minutes.  Finally, a young lady with green tinted hair and several face piercings came to the counter.  “Can I help you?”

“Yes, thank you.  I would like a Whopper meal with cheese, no pick…”

“No, you have to use the kiosk,” she said tapping on the big screen to my left.

“What?”

“Yeah.  I don’t take orders.”

Well.  I just turned on my heels and walked out.  You see, the last time I was confronted with a self-serve ordering gismo, at a McDonalds, it got my order wrong, and also I missed out on the dollar menu options.  User error in both cases, I’m sure, but I don’t want to be responsible for punching in my own order.  I want human back and forth communication when I order a meal.

Call me old, but I feel that part of the eating out experience, even if just at a fast food joint, is human interaction.

When I got back into the car, I pulled out my phone and tried getting onto the BK website to lodge my complaint.  I wanted to let them know that I had just walked out of one of their establishments because they had installed a self-serve kiosk which I wasn’t interested in learning how to use.  The automatic response I received from the customer service bot was that without a receipt, it would not accept my complaint.

I didn’t have a receipt, of course, because I had walked out without ordering.

OK, fine.  Drove a bit farther along, came to a Carl’s Jr.  Where a very nice young man took my order, allowed me to change it after he’d already entered it in (“hold the pickles on that last order!” he yelled back), and actually brought my food out to me where I was sitting.  I’m guessing he only took that last action because the place was empty.  I imagine normally I’d have come back up to the counter to retrieve it.

What a nice young man.

And it occurred to me, one way to get my revenge on BK for treating me like a faceless customer whose absence they won’t even miss would be to include this episode in my novel.  One of my main characters, Nisi, a seventy-year-old woman traveling across the country in 2023, would be as unhappy as I was to be required to use a self-serve kiosk to get her food.

But then I thought maybe it’d be a too mean thing to do to my character.

So, I’m getting my revenge this way instead.  I’m sharing that episode with you all, on this blog.

Take that, Burger King.

(Sigh.  They’ll still never know).