Fellow employees are just as bad

Sometimes it's not the customers who are dumb. I mean, they are, but it's almost like it's somewhat expected.. as if to be a proper customer one must receive a lobotomy. Sometimes it's the coworkers who really make things the hell.

Today I was supposed to assist the presenter (the person who hands out food in drive thru) by setting up their drinks so that they were made, had lids on them, were wiped clean, and put in drink carriers as needed. She kept complaining *constantly* about how hard it was to present, how confusing it was when orders skipped around, how bothersome it was to have another person or two nearby because she totally had this, etc. I finally had enough of her whining and told her that I would switch places, so that she would be responsible for drinks and I would hand the food out the window. And what did she do? She wandered around randomly like an idiot, didn't help with drinks, didn't even try to make a single drink from the coffee machines, and was generally acting like just a warm body that mcd employs for the sake of employing people.

Now, at our store, the drive thru experience can be a tad trickier. Due to how the store sits (at a corner of a busy intersection, right near a hospital), there are two different speakers, one for each entryway a person can drive in, basically one is closer to the road and the other closer to the store. Now, these two speakers would usually have two different people taking the orders during the day (at night we're lucky if we get that, usually you have one person taking orders on both of those speakers and taking money at the same time) in addition to one person just responsible for handling money. Sometimes one person's order is finished before another, and that's ok, because each car gets a picture taken to make it somewhat easier to identify them-- although if we get two cars that are both white, for example, that can all go to pot.

I bring this up mostly because of the concept of multi orders, basically where a person requires more than one transaction at a time. Due to how the system is configured, orders show up on the front screen depending on whose order was taken first, and that can be bad when you have a multi order started on one speaker while there are three other orders that have already given their order and paid, because the screen will still show that multi order as first since it was started first, even though it wasn't stored and paid first.

Sometimes we get screwed up when a multi order is displayed because we have to put in at the very very beginning of the order that it's a multi order; otherwise the system won't let us indicate that there's more than one order and confusion results. In those cases, we learn to watch for the bottom of the order to indicate whether it is stored, totaled, or paid out, and the paid out order we know is at the window to have their food handed to them.

Now we bring it all the way back to the girl at the beginning because the above are basic facts that should be known, mostly because I've been the first to actually realize this at work and I tell people all the time why the screen displays the way it does. If she had been someone who just started, sure, I could understand the confusion. But she's been there for a few months now, and yet this concept just flies over her head, and she gets easily confused in drive thru, so whines about how *HARD* it is to present.

She's not the only one who seems to think it's hard. Right now there's an underaged worker who just found out she's pregnant (like a month along) and she acts like she's 9 months along, complaining about how confusing presenting is and how tired she is.. blah blah blah. That I really have little sympathy for, because almost up until the day I gave birth just a few months ago, I was lifting heavy items, moving around constantly, wiping myself out dead tired each day trying to do the work of three people, and did it without complaint. There's no excuse for complaining about how tiring or confusing the job is!