Monday, March 9, 2009

The Apocalypse is Nigh. They ran outta nuggets.



Why? Why do people have to be so damnably stupid?

I eat out a few times a month, and occasionally something isn’t the way I wanted it. Sometimes I just suck it up, since often in life there are more important things to get riled up about, but at other times I’ll make sure that it’s made right. However, in all of my nearly 40 years of turning oxygen into carbon dioxide have I ever felt the compulsion to dial 911 over a botched restaurant order. I mean, I’ve had to get a manager over things like something that felt like a pebble in my corned beef hash, or a weensy green inchworm that shimmied his way across a plate from a piece of unwashed garnish leaf, and both of those got me a free meal. But to call 911? But wait…I’m ahead of myself here.

Latreasa L. Goodman, 27, made three calls to 911after she tried to get her money back from a Fort Pierce McDonald's and the cashier told her all sales were final. It seems that they were out of McNuggets, and Goodman snapped. I guess fried niblets of processed chicken goo are a crisis situation of Biblical proportions.

Police released the 911 tapes, and holy shit they’re positively hysterical.
"This is an emergency. If I would have known they didn't have McNuggets, I wouldn't have given my money, and now she wants to give me a McDouble, but I don't want one," police quoted her as saying. "This is an emergency."

The cashier suggested she choose something else off the menu of equal value to the McNuggets, and offered up a cheeseburger called the McDouble. (This is the cheap replacement for the Double Cheeseburger off the 99-cent value menu. Instead of two pseudo-beef flakes and two slivers of something akin to cheese, there’s only one cheese-like sliver. This saves Ronald McDonald at least 2 cents a burger in profits.)
"She's trying to force me to eat something off the menu and I don't want it," Goodman told 911.

Lady, no one held a gun to your head and said you had to eat it or there’d be a 230-grain steel-jacketed hollow-point burrowing through your cerebellum. A lack of McNuggets is not an emergency. Was someone trapped in a burning building? Were the Jaws of Life needed to extricate a victim from a wrecked car? Was a naked wino brandishing a box cutter and singing Gregorian chants? No. It was six chintzy-assed pieces of deep-fried poultry squeezin’s.

And yet, it came to Mizz Goodman as a great surprise when the police arrived, apparently without a SWAT team or helicopter support, and cited her for misuse of the 911 system. I woulda paid good money to watch that little scene unfold. It had to have been utterly priceless.

A McDonald's spokesman said Goodman should have been given a refund, and she's being sent a gift card for a free meal. See, there we go; a happy ending. The minimum wage asstard at the counter should have just done that from the get-go, but I’ve never seen a plethora of rocket scientists running the counter in the middle of the day at the Golden Arches. One noted exception would be the girl I went to school with who managed a McDonald’s through her six years of school while getting her Master’s degree. Sadly, my local establishment is by & large staffed by slack-jawed mouth-breathers who can barely speak your order back to you in something beyond an unintelligible mumble.

Perhaps this calls for one of my patented Sad Meals?
Da-da-da-da-daaaaaaaa…I’m hatin’ it!

1 comment:

Brooke said...

When my husband lost his job suddenly a few months back, I was a stay at home mom. We needed money RIGHT NOW, so I took a job at Wal-Mart, which is not my area of training, but I could get money flowing in immediately.

After just a couple months there, I honestly do not know how some people figure out how to get out of bed and put their pants on in the morning. Seriously.