Tag: customer service

Of Jabba the Hutt & McGruff the Crime Dog.

It’s roughly ten in the eve and I slip out the door for a smoke, having just gotten done mopping the dining room. I hear a noise in the parking lot. Looking up, over by the drive-thru I see a half-naked guy staring at the ground. Jabba the Hutt in human flesh. He’s kind of wobbling, unbalanced, undoubtedly fucked up on something.

I smoke faster.

By the time I get inside, Natalie, the manager, informs me that Jabba is reportedly making the woman who just pulled into drive-thru uncomfortable. I don’t see him out the window anymore, but one of the girls tell me he’s on the other side of the store.

I unlock the back drive-thru window and stick my head out. And standing in between cars, there he is: dirty man boobs, jiggly beer belly, and all. He’s wearing two different kind of shoes and has a cigarette butt burning passed the filter hanging out the side of his super-slug mouth.

“Hey man,” I ask him, “what are you doing?”

This seemed like a reasonable opener.

“I wanted some food,” he says, holding up his baggy, stained shorts with one hand.

“Well, the inside is closed and you need a car to go through drive-thru.”

On a side note, I hate that I’m forced to point this fact out so often. The very presence of the word “drive” in “drive-thru,” I feel, should make this a no-brainer, but alas…

“Can I talk to the manager?”

“She’s busy right now. Just give us a call.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

I shrug. “Sorry man.”

This, of course, is not the end of it. He keeps pressing to talk to the manager, so I ask him kindly to step aside, out of the line of cars, and I’d let her know. I close and lock the window, go back up to the active drive-thru window and give Natalie the run-down.

We look out the window and Jabba is now sitting on the curb, leaning, splaying his filthy tummy to the growing line of increasingly uncomfortable customers. She confesses to me that she hopes that if she only ignores him he’ll go away, but I just stare her dead in the eyes as I slowly shake my head from side to side for dramatic effect.

I’ve seen Return of the Jedi countless times since I was a kid. I know all to well that he is immune to our Jedi mind tricks.

A few cars pass and he approaches the window, evidently having grown impatient. Natalie approaches and I hang close by, trying to find out where the broom is so I have some object to use as a weapon, just in case shit goes south. I find one. He asks her for food, free food, and she apologizes, informing him that we can’t do that. She then politely asks him to back up so the next customer can pull up and slowly closes the window.

I’m sure this comes as a surprise, but he does not back up. He merely crouches down, picks up an old nugget off the ground, stands back up, pops it in his mouth without a moment’s hesitation, and starts chew-chew-chewing away at it like a cow to cud.

Natalie’s anger finally overcomes her uneasiness. She opens up the window again, and this time firmly says, “You’re in the way. If you don’t move, I’m going to have to call the cops.”

“Call them then!”

And with Jabba’s blessing, she does, and she asks me to lock the drive-thru window as she holds the land line to her ear. Broom close by, I latch and lock the window, avoiding eye contact with the angry, bloated slug-man as I do so. He backs up to let the next car pull up, but stares back at me from beyond the car, yelling shit at me that I couldn’t hear. The guy in the car looks nervous but understanding and says he’ll pull around the building for his food.

After that, Jabba seems to vanish. Once I see the three police cruisers pull in from the other side of the store, I feel it’s safe to take the trash out the stock room door, and so promptly do so.

Back in the dark corral that houses the dumpsters, I hear defiant though indecipherable yelling through shaky, rhythmic gurgling. I imagine this is him getting tazed. Once back inside, I learn I’m right. At some point he was evidently also lying flat on the ground. The cops tried to pick him up by his hands and feet, at which point he bit one of the officers.

Sometimes, McGruff, crime takes a bite out of you.

I mean, I guess it makes sense. He did say he was hungry, after all, and almost anything — even raw bacon — had to taste better than that fucking filthy ground-nugget.

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate this town?

Customers of Confusion.

We close the dining room of our fast food palace of misery and chaos every day at nine o’clock, and on Sundays the entire store closes at that time. Its been this way since the dawn of the pandemic, and since shortly after Covid hit we’ve also had signs up on both drive-thru speakers informing anyone who pulls up that we close up early on Sundays.

Sometimes, due to being perpetually shorthanded, they’ll close up dining room early throughout the week, so early that the doors are locked when I arrive for my shift at three in the evening. When I go out for a smoke during my shift I used to tell people before they walk all the way up to the door or before they climb out of the car that we’re closed inside just to save them some time. Some are thankful, but most scowl and cuss at or in response to me as if I not only locked the doors myself but that I did it strictly for the purposes of ruining their day. As a consequence, I now do this selectively.

On Sundays, the situation is even worse after we close the entire store at nine. People will park at the drive-thru speaker for ten minutes, blind to the sign announcing we’re closed, waiting for someone to take their order. Vehicles will line up behind them, awaiting their turn to ignore the sign hanging in clear view before their selectively-ignorant faces before they finally, finally grow tired of waiting and then — not always, of course, but bloody often enough — cuss and scream and damn the place as a whole to hell before peeling off to put their low degree of maturity on full display.

This Sunday was no different in that respect, though it was a wee bit heavier on the weirdness and confusion.

As I was leaving last night and driving around the building towards the exit, I saw a pretty black lady in a dress with some beehive hairdo walk along the drive-thru pad. I decided when I drive by her I’d inform her we were closed. I watched as she put her purse down on the drive through pad and then walked toward the speaker, leaving it behind her without glancing back. That was only the first peculiar observation.

Within moments, I stopped right beside her just as she got to the speaker, hung my head out the window, and said, “Sorry, ma’am, we closed at nine.”

Unless she’s partially deaf, she had to have heard me; if by chance she couldn’t make out what I said, at the very least the sound of my voice certainly should have alerted her to my presence. It did not. She didn’t turn her head at all. Didn’t budge.

I then repeated myself, this time even louder, at which point she actually became alerted to my presence. Very casually, she then turned her head towards me and began placing her order, just as if she were talking to the drive-thru speaker to the other side of her.

“Hi,” she said in a voice that, while extremely polite, seemed unnaturally high-pitched, “can I get one of those frozen Cokes?”

I looked at her in a way that I feared betrayed my confusion and, as politely as I could manage, I repeated myself yet again.

“Ma’am, we closed at nine.”

“Oh,” she said, “you close at nine. Thank you.”

And then she continued walking on passed the speaker, her purse still on the drive-thru pad behind her, where she’d left it.

I’ve pretty much given up on people making any sense to me.