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Katie had a late lacrosse match at the Athens Drive HS stadium against Cardinal Gibbons where Katie made her debut in goal and will be just as happy to not do that again anytime soon! She’s never really been a fan of the position when she played football and apparently lacrosse isn’t much more enjoyable between the pipes for her but she held her hand up when the team asked for volunteers and was rewarded with a hero’s reception at full time.

As I had a free Chick Fil-A sandwich in my pocket and two kids needing to be fed, we put in a mobile order in the stadium car park to be picked up at the Garner location near Timber Drive and US-70.

Late night before closing…living on the edge or living the sweet life with the Lord’s Bird? You make the call… 🙂

• 2030 – Order placed via the mobile app.
• 2043 – Arrive in the queue and actually make it into the conga line proper only 10m away from the order board.
• 2045 – The order taker arrives as I’ve made it to within 2m of the order board. If you’ve been following this series of posts, you’ll quickly discover I’m not at all a fan of inappropriate greetings starting with “hey”. This order taker throws me an unusual curve ball with no greeting at all before just jumping right to it. I’ll deal with that below…
• 2046 – At the order board just before the choke point.
• 2048 – Arrival at the single-file choke point.
• 2052 – Turned the corner of the back of the restaurant with the window 10m away. A harbinger of what’s to come is a lively collection of cars that have been sent off to the spaces from the window.
• 2053 – Arrived at the window and get the bad news. I’ve rarely had good fortune in other drive-throughs when being moved off to wait (as in sit there for 15 minutes or longer after they’ve collected the money as they empty their queue) but the young lady at the window was super pleasant and nice that I’d figure I’d take a chance it’d work out.
• 2055 – We’re parked in the space directly ahead of the window rather than the spaces at the side to wait for the order to be delivered.
• 2056 – Order delivered by different super pleasant young lady and we’re out of there.

Thirteen minutes with multiple cars parked off the window at the close isn’t the worst time I’ve ever encountered and for once actually moving off the window to wait doesn’t turn out to be a huge own goal.

For many years, I’ve not had the best of luck being parked away from a drive-through window even though the initial post in this series advocated for that strategy as a way to dramatically shorten the time spent in the queue.

I’ve got two pet peeves when the person at the window tries to park you:

• They want you to wait even though no one is behind you so they can stop the clock and make their drive-through times look better than they actually are. I love it when they tell me they’re getting the manager…I’ve got no problem telling that person that rather than arguing with me about a decision to stay where I am as long as the queue is empty and that their time would be better served getting the order together and making sure it’s correct.
• Even worse is when they want to park you and outright lie to you about how long you can expect to wait there. I’m not asking that person to swear an oath on whatever holy text they choose to time it to the exact second. But I was at a Popeye’s in Garner where they knew there was a run on tenders well before I *ORDERED* much less got to the window to pay, they took the money, and then dropped the bad news that it’d be about 20 minutes to wait until it was done (and ended up being 30…no apology, no restitution…and I’ve not been back since). Had they owned up to a *REASONABLE* estimate that could withstand scrutiny, I could have at least been allowed to make an informed choice (as adults ought to be able to do!) about whether to stay or get a refund and go elsewhere (which given the time of night I would have in that instance).

It all comes down to being reasonable…pushing me off to make an artificial time target or when it really is only about a minute or two should not have me waiting for 5-10 minutes. Just get on with it and let’s be done with it, eh?

But if there’s bad news (and chicken does take longer to properly cook…no one needs salmonella poisoning!), please be honest and up front about it before accepting payment and I’ll be more than happy to work with you or go somewhere else if I really can’t afford to sit for a long wait. Trying to blow me off and/or lie to me just to get me to move, on the other hand, is really not on as far as I’m concerned.

In this case, were it not for the amazing attitude of the young lady at the window and not wanting to be a hypocrite after suggesting they utilise that tool to keep a very long queue moving as quickly as possible…I didn’t really fight to stay where I was and it worked out well in this instance.

So….what to make of that initial non-greeting? Truth be told, that’s the only time that’s ever happened to me (and there was only one other instance at Brier Creek years ago where everyone from the surly order taker to the jerk at the window and the even worse manager were rude beyond belief…and fortunately were nowhere to be seen the last time I was there and did the fastest trip through the conga line ever at three minutes even with the queue being rather busy).

I’ve consistently despised overly familiar greetings with people who are complete strangers so on one hand, a non-greeting and just getting on with making the encounter as brief as possible actually rates better in my book than “hey!” which really irritates me.

But on the other hand, I’d imagine that S Truett Cathy (the founder of Chick Fil-A who I’d met more than a few times at church in Daytona Beach) would have been mightily displeased had he been watching this kid give the non-greeting.

Part of the appeal of Chick Fil-A is that they don’t generally treat you like crap and with contempt that is standard operating procedure at other chains.

If anything, they go overboard in the other direction and mean well in doing so even though casual use of someone’s name without permission or leave (particularly by a complete stranger much younger than you!) is considered very rude and tantamount to a deadly insult to Hungarians.

I’ve tried to quietly explain that to them a couple of times but it’s as ingrained as the “my pleasure” they’re trained to say whenever you ask them to do something for you.

I’ll probably never win on that front but I do insist that at least the minimum of respect should come my way and “hey” from the teenagers just won’t do. I think I’ve earned that at the very least.

So, let’s get to the rating for this encounter:

• Initial greeting: I’d have left this at a big fat zero for the violation of their brand but the two young ladies on the other side of the restaurant *MORE* than made up for it and neither of them led off with that unwelcome word. Ordinarily the second attempt at proper greeting being successful gets a half point back but these two girls were so on-point that I could let the non-greeting go owing to it being late in the evening.
• Order correctness: full marks here…totally correct even if we had to wait on the firing line right in front of the window to get it.
• Waffle fries: full marks as well…they were nice and very hot which is the way you want them because they’re not going to stay that way for long when the surface area bleeds off the heat very quickly!
• Sandwich: the sandwich was on the small side but the coating was crispy and good…I’m going to knock half a point for size but it was still tasty.

This one started kinda iffy but the back-end was very solid and the final score is 3.5 points on the four point scale.