As I was leaving to collect Alex from his summer school at Athens Drive High School, I got a call for help to stop by Panera and get a bowl of soup for a certain someone who was finding their office was much closer to the conditions of the Pleistocene epoch than she wished it to be.
Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough.
—- Peter Pan
As it happens, there’s a Panera in Crossroads near the school and that’s where we headed…after a fashion. I’ll admit to a wee bit of cerebral flatulence of forgetting I knew it was in the same strip mall area as the BJ’s Warehouse club but decided to tour another strip mall instead.
My bad! 🙂
Anywho, Alex and I wander into Panera to make the order with the human being standing behind one of the point-of-sale terminals. Or at least that was the plan as he beckoned us forward only to make a weird sort of noise when we got there and then he buggered off to the other end of the restaurant near the food delivery area to have a conversation with someone.
For more than few minutes where I’m occasionally making eye contact with him and wondering if he’s planning on returning.
He does but only after his co-worker turns up to the terminal to take the order at which point I see the wandering Andre is apparently a “leader” or at least his name tag seems to think so.
His replacement wasn’t the most conversant in the language nor did she grasp the finer points of “what side do you suggest for someone who had just had dental work” when the choices are an apple (NO!), a baguette (kind of chewy), or crisps (which she could at least trade with a co-worker) and finally decided on the crisps.
Panera is apparently another one of those places where they want your name as part of the order (Chick Fil-A being another) but after growing up as an Army brat, I’ve come to jealously guard what little privacy I have because growing up I had darned little of it!
I’m not looking for a relationship…just take the bloody order and let me collect it on the other end.
Which is where the fun really started.
The person responsible for putting the order together and bagging it seemed far more interested in her Apple watch than actually putting orders together and bagging them!
Of the five minutes I spent watching her, four were spent on her phone or complaining with coworkers about stuff Panera could probably care less about.
She finally produces the bag with Julia’s order which was sealed with some tape. Now, an order with soup would seem to require something to be put in that bag with the soup. The spoon didn’t seem to be in evidence (nor were the chips so even though the order said chips…there was a baguette instead).
It took another three minutes of her fiddling with her watch and then her phone to do some surfing before she has the situational awareness to discover I was still standing there.
She says she put a spoon in the bag but produces another one because I’d rather not show up with none at all on this delivery and then we’re out of there.
It’s a darned shame that the people working at the two Panera’s in the area I’ve visited are uniformly penny dreadful.
Not that I go there very often because I think they’re overpriced for what you get by a huge margin even though the Bacon Turkey Bravo is a real winner of a sandwich. If it were 2-3x the size for the same price, they’d have a hell of a time keeping my panoramic fanny out of that place!
They seem to be in the midde of a menu retooling. Maybe they’ll figure out that snotty and indifferent employees are something that really ought to be off their menu as well.