Let me tell you something. The Drive-Thru, like communism, is a BAD IDEA.
Why is it a bad idea, you ask?
I’ll tell you why it’s a bad idea. Stress. That’s why.
Look, the Drive-Thru was created to make people’s lives better. That’s right, it was designed to make the world a better place. What it actually does is the complete opposite.
Let’s take a typical scene here in Canada. You’re driving along in your car, and you pass a shrine of hockey and coffee – Tim Horton’s, for your foreigners. Mmm, you think to yourself. Coffee is good. Canada’s national passtime is not, in fact hockey. Neither is it lacrosse. It is coffee consumption.
So you pull into the Drive-Thru. There’s only two vehicles in front of you. It being a nice spring day, you decide to open your window. Ten seconds later, you roll it back up. Why? The 1978 Ford F-150 – driven by a guy with a mesh-back John Deere ball cap on – in front of your is missing on two cylinders and burning a quart of oil a week. The air is positively blue behind him. And he’s not even the guy at the little ordering speaker. The guy at the ordering speaker is driving a BMW, and you just know about BMW drivers. Before you managed to get your window back up, you’ve just had time to catch his order. It’s a sandwich. But not just any sandwich. A multigrain bagel – double toasted – with turkey and lettuce, but no mayo, and mustard on the side please, and margarine, not butter. And could you maybe not double-toast it as much as maybe just one and a half toasts?
Your heart rate goes up as your anger increases, pumping that soot from the truck in front of your all around your body where it can do maximum damage.
Finally the guy in the Bimmer drives up to the window, and Farmer John pulls up. He’ll have a….MEDIUM COFFEE – BLACK….and…..uh…....umm….......just a second. He turns to his wife, who was either a hippo or a trucker in her youth, and proceeds to get bickered at for a FULL 3 minutes. Make that TWO MEDIUM COFFEES…...err what’s that honey? Sorry. ONE LARGE BLACK COFFEE, ONE MEDIUM BLACK COFFEE. He finally drive up, leaving you at the speaker, finally ready to order. Down goes the window.
“One moment please.”
If you haven’t had a stress induced aneurism by this point, you’re a trooper. You can hear that guy in the BMW arguing about how his bagel is 12-grain, not multigrain. You can see the slack-jawed pimply Tim Horton’s guy leaning out the window. The truck in front of you is spewing out more filth than a recently industrialized third world nation. The car behind you is a riced out Honda Civic with Snoop Dogg blaring out the window and the THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD that accompanies Gin & Juice rattling the fillings out of your teeth.
This was supposed to be a nice relaxing cup of joe! Eventually, after the equivalent of three weeks worth of Hamilton air (Americans can think of, say, Detroit or Pittsburg), more stress than the average human was designed to withstand, and more hip-hop than you thought existed, you’ve got that cup of hot nectar you’ve been craving.
And do it all again tomorrow.
Never get between a Canadian and a Timmy’s.