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I've been going to McDonald's on my lunch breaks a lot lately. I've come to the conclusion this is not good for either my health or my sanity. The health issue is obvious: I usually end up getting a double Quarter Pounder with cheese, and too many of those will put you in danger of ballooning to gargantuan proportions in no time. The sanity issue has to do with the particular McDonald's I visit. It's the closest one to my job-- it takes me less than five minutes to drive there-- but it's become such a slipshod, incompetent mess that I can barely tolerate it.

The worst was this past Thursday. I stopped there for breakfast on my way in to work, and waited for what seemed like an eternity as people who had ordered after me got their food and left. One of the Colonial Williamsburg bus drivers was in line behind me, and got so frustrated that she blurted out, "s**t, I should go back there and make the damn food myself" loud enough that I know the kitchen staff probably heard her. (She also claimed to have actually done it in the past, and she's formidable and aggressive enough that I believe her.) But I finally got my food, and it wasn't terrible, even though the hash browns were overcooked.

Why did I return for lunch the same day, after that experience? Laziness, probably; it's just so easy to drive someplace close, and I never think to bring my own lunch. In any event, it was a mistake. I waited twenty-five minutes for my food. It was an unbelievably frustrating experience, but the long wait gave me ample time to observe exactly how poor the management is in that place. The employees were doing the best they could, but the manager kept screwing things up, rushing headlong from the drive-thru back to the counter, picking up the wrong items, and barking orders at people who were in the middle of doing one task in order to shift them to something completely unnecessary. (During breakfast, he was taking the orders at both the inside register and the drive-thru, which probably explains a lot.) Things would have run at least five times more efficiently if he'd just left them the hell alone and let them do their jobs.

Even after that experience, I went back on Saturday, again because of the proximity; the moment I entered, I noticed it felt really humid, even more so than outside, and an older woman was at the counter yelling at a different male manager, "I CAME INSIDE TO COOL OFF!" The air conditioning was broken, though it did feel a little cooler towards the back of the restaurant. Unfortunately, this manager was even less competent than the other guy. I ordered a Quarter Pounder with only pickle, along with a five-piece Chicken Selects meal. After the kid at the counter had taken my order correctly, the guy in the kitchen asked about the burger, and the manager shouted back that it shouldn't have any pickles. The kid corrected him, but to no avail; when I got the burger, the cheese was too stuck to the bun to check, and it was half eaten by the time I realized there were no pickles. And before that, when the kid asked me what kind of sauce I wanted for the chicken, the manager thought he was saying he needed fries with no salt. This manager also exuded a smarmy attitude; he made me think of Bill Geist from the CBS Sunday Morning show with the genial attitude surgically removed and replaced with the personality of an especially obnoxious Will Ferrell character.

So, I either need to start bringing my lunch, or I need to find a better fast food restaurant. This McDonald's has deteriorated so badly I'm not sure it can be saved.