The Ghost Order

Newsletter 2023-05-08

I know how food works. You put it in your mouth and swallow. Some people might also chew, but that’s an unnecessary intermediate step. I prefer soft foods I can ingest whole. That category includes Jell-o, macaroni, and any cut of meat with bones smaller than your finger. You won’t choke as long as you can unhinge your jaw like a snake. If you can taste what you’re shoving in your face, you’re eating too slow.

I also know how restaurants work. Last week, I wrote an entire newsletter about how much I hate them. I made an exception, however, for fast food. The quickness of it appeals to me, a guy who won’t even slow down enough to use his teeth. It’s also at a price point I can appreciate. While fast food is more expensive than cooking at home, it’s still far more affordable than any place fancy enough to require a tip. I’m a customer, not your human resources department. I shouldn’t be deciding how much your employees get paid. Yet every meal at a sit down restaurant ends with me deliberating over how much of her rent a single mother of three will be able to pay this month. Looks like I’m giving twenty-five percent again.

No sooner did I sing the praises of fast food (even if that praise was just me saying it’s not quite as terrible as a sit-down restaurant) than I was betrayed. The crisis started with Waffle. After the all-school email about her last week, I let her pick where we went out to eat. She chose a burger joint with a drive-through. Someone is making a strong play to be my favorite child. I’m tempted to name the place, but I’ll hold off for now. I’m not afraid of being sued. The truth is an absolute defense against accusations of libel. I’m more concerned that everyone else has mastered ordering from this place and I’m the only one who can’t figure it out. You can’t point out all the ways I’m wrong if I stay vague enough that you have no idea what I’m talking about. Well, you can, but your insults will have to be less specific. You’re never wrong when you say that I suck at life.

This place wouldn’t normally be my first choice as a fast food outlet because it’s not as cheap or quick as other restaurants in that category. It’s more like medium speed food than fast food, but half of its menu is milkshakes, which appeals to my children’s innate desire to avoid anything even remotely nutritious. They react to healthy food like a demon reacts to holy water. This chain restaurant was also a cornerstone of my high school years. In the mid-size city where I grew up, the medium food place was one of only two businesses open after 9 p.m.. The other was Walmart. If my friends and I got tired of driving in circles, which is how we spent the majority of our Saturday nights, our options were to order a combo meal or wander through the clearance aisle. That was as exciting as things got for us in central Illinois. Apparently other teenagers spent those years attending parties and going out on dates. I bet they’re jealous of all the cheeseburgers I ate.

Photo by Jonathan Cooper on Unsplash

Waffle said it was okay if I picked up her celebratory meal and brought it home, which made me love her all the more. I placed the order Friday evening from the gym. I can’t think of a better time to cue up dietary garbage than while sitting on an exercise machine. Negative progress is still progress. I timed the order so I could finish my workout and drive across town to pick it up right when it was ready. The app confirmed my purchase and said the food would be bagged up and good to go in sixteen to twenty-one minutes. I arrived at the restaurant exactly twenty-two minutes later. I was impressed by my own accidental precision. I had opted for curbside pickup to further speed up the process. I pulled up to the designated spot and called the phone number on the sign. The manager said he’d never heard of me or my order. Whoever I was, I had no business with him. All right, then. I was going inside.

Things still weren’t off the rails. Mistakes happen. My wife once tried to order from the same restaurant but accidentally picked a location by her job rather than by our house. We realized our error too late to cancel the order. Rather than causing a scene, Lola simply called the employees working the late shift at her lab and told them dinner was on her. Ever since then, I’ve made sure to double check the location when ordering, especially when dealing with this specific restaurant. Before going inside, I checked the app again. It said my order had gone through to this exact site and that it should be ready now. I walked in the door.

I showed the manager the completed order on the app and the confirmation email that I got afterwards. He showed me his computer screen, which said there were no orders pending. It wasn’t a big deal. I asked him to just make the food I had proof that I already paid for. He scoffed. I was requesting something that was clearly impossible. This is 2023. You can’t simply give someone money and expect food in return. That basic transaction, which dates back to the dawn of human civilization, has been replaced by a better system. Now, you place an order through a proprietary app that a company insists you must use. Then, the company takes your money. Finally, the company says there is no order and acts like you’re an idiot for thinking that there was one just because they gave you two separate forms of confirmation that it went through. Technology has truly made all of our lives better and more efficient—as long as you never need to eat.

While this wasn’t the ideal customer service experience, it still wasn’t a crisis. There was another way out of this situation. If the medium food place couldn’t make me the food I’d already paid for, they could give me my money back. Then we could start over with a new order I’d make face-to-face, or I could go somewhere else. I gave the manager all of these solutions to resolve our mutual dilemma. He looked at me like I was the biggest headache he’d ever dealt with. Now we were off the rails.

The problem was that double proof wasn’t enough proof that I’d paid for anything. Until my order actually showed up on his computer, it didn’t exist, no matter what documentation I had on my phone. He could make the food that was listed on my confirmation, but he couldn’t actually give it to me until the electronic order showed up. Until then, he would basically have to hold it hostage. I could look at it. I could smell it. But I absolutely, positively could not take it home with me. When would the order show up? There was no way to know. It had been thirty minutes since I placed it and got multiple confirmations. In the world of medium speed food, however, electronic transactions don’t work that fast. The individual bits of data have to be carried back and forth by a man on a horse. It could be another thirty minutes. It could be another thirty days. There was no way to say for sure. It all boiled down to how well rested the horse was and whether or not there were any bandits along the way. Until the man on the horse arrived, the manager could neither cancel my order nor carry it out. My options were to wait indefinitely or to give up and leave without my money or my food. In the meantime, the manager had actual customers to get to. Have a nice day.

I’m not prone to giving fast food employees—or really any employees, or anyone—a hard time. When faced with confrontation, my preferred resolution is to slink away and never again leave my house. I’ve also worked in fast food before. It was my very first job when I was sixteen. Sometimes I charged people the wrong amount or gave them the wrong food. Refunds were issued and orders were corrected. But I never once had a situation where I took all of a customer’s money and then refused to give them any food in return. This was uncharted territory. I wish I could have just walked away. Unfortunately, I had a family at home waiting for dinner, including a little girl to whom I had made a very specific promise about a specific meal. Also, I was out fifty dollars. Even cheap food is expensive these days.

I resisted every impulse in my body to flee and instead insisted that, if the manager couldn’t give me food, he would have to give me my money back. We talked in circles. The manager insisted that what I was asking was impossible. The only way something like that could even be attempted is if he walked to the computer alllllllll the way in the back of the restaurant. He built it up like I was telling him to carry a ring across Middle Earth. He’d also have to write down approximately four pieces of information from the confirmation email. No human being has ever before been asked to record so much on a single sheet of paper. Finally, when he realized there was no other way to get rid of me, he let out the world’s longest sigh. He looked at my confirmation email again, wrote down what he needed, and set off on the longest and hardest journey of his life. He was gone for a minute and a half. Somehow, he was able to cancel the transaction he didn’t have. Perhaps the man on the horse had a falcon who he sent ahead with a note tied to its leg, but that message was just my credit card numbers and a charge for fifty dollars with no order attached. Naturally, the restaurant assumed it was a charitable donation. How dare I come in now and expect food in return? I found the problem, and it was me.

While the manager was canceling my non-existent order, I reread the confirmation email he and I had both been staring at for entirely too long. On the app, I specifically chose the option for the medium food place to make the meal right away. The app confirmed that the food would go on the grill without delay and gave me an estimated time for when it would be done. But the separate confirmation email said—in tiny text that neither I nor the manager noticed—that that was a lie. The restaurant wouldn’t start cooking until I found and clicked an extra confirmation link buried in the email. Completing the order on the app wasn’t enough. Calling to confirm wasn’t enough. Coming in in person wasn’t enough. I had to complete the order on the app, receive a confirmation email, and then click an additional confirmation link. That’s right: Ordering burgers there now required triple electronic verification. There are fewer levels of confirmation required to launch a nuclear strike. What the email didn’t say was that it wouldn’t even tell the restaurant my order existed until I clicked that link, making all prior confirmations irrelevant. But it would send my credit card numbers and my money right away with no secondary or tertiary confirmation needed, but only to the computer in the back that can only be accessed by making the manager sigh heavily three times in a row. I clicked the link to see what would happen. The order instantly appeared on the restaurant’s computers. The manager had already issued a refund for the order he said he couldn’t see. I told him to cancel it for a second time. Then I left, never to return.

It had now been forty-five minutes since I first started trying to get medium speed food. After a frantic phone call to Lola, I pivoted and pulled into the parking lot for the fastest of fast food places. This time, I wouldn’t mess with technology. I would order food with my actual human voice, albeit transmitted through the grainy microphone in the drive-through. I asked for five of the same combo we’ve been ordering there for years. The detached voice coming out of the speaker said that wasn’t an option. Now I could only get that combo if I placed my order through the restaurant’s custom app. I wanted to drive off a cliff. I ordered something else.

I arrived back home more than an hour after I placed the first order with different food than the kids wanted from a different restaurant than Waffle requested. Everyone had something to complain about. In other words, it was a completely normal night. The moral of the story is eating out is the worst and I was right to be afraid of it. I could have cooked a meal at home in far less time for far less money and with far less irritation. The only upside is there’s now one restaurant in town I can never show my face in again. If I can get a soft ban from the rest of them, we can eat all of our meals at home. I have a new mission in life.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James