Humans can manage to screw up even the clearest order.

Once upon a time I'd go through the McD drive through every workday morning on the way to work, and order a big breakfast with hotcakes. I did this for about a year.

Then one day I instead ordered a sausage McMuffin and an Egg McMuffin.

I heard the order taker saying in a disbelieving tone to someone else "he ordered something different today!".

When I was at the pay window paying, two or three different people stopped to ask the cashier if it was true that I had really changed my order.

When I got to the other window to pick up my order, there were still people coming up to the person manning the window to ask if it was really true that my order had changed. I could also hear people in the background talking about it.

In short, apparently everyone working there was talking about my change of order as if it was the most astounding thing they had ever witnessed.

They handed me the bag, and I checked it--and they had gotten it wrong! The sausage McMuffin was missing, another Egg McMuffin in its place.

At a cafe near the office, the barrista would line up my drink as I entered the door, I only had to smile at her and pay at the counter.

This over 20 years ago.

Some things stick in the memory, on both sides.

Regular customers definitely have an air of celebrity about them.

Honestly, I expect that would be the easy part.

The hard part is:

"Can you put [specific toy] in the kids meal?"

"Wait, no, I want ketchup on that. I mean, mustard."

"Can you bring it out to me when its ready?"

"Your ice machine is broken?"

"My debit card doesn't have much money on it, so just ring up my order until it hits $20."

Taking an order is totally doable. Answering questions that require stateful knowledge is hard.

“A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 99999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a ueicbksjdhd.

First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone.”

https://twitter.com/brenankeller/status/1068615953989087232

<artificial sound of typing>

"Just wait a second while I look that up"

"Ok, your debit balance is zero."

"I see you haven't ordered a drink, would you like to add one?"

Oh, you're one of those. My parents never order what's on the menu. They've always got to customize it. Which is fine. But then they get all bent out of shape when the order isn't right. From a fast food joint. Can't you just order what's on the damn menu?

:)

It's not like they don't have the ingredients.. and I'm expressly asking them to give me less of them, not adding any.

It's not like being pissed off because something isn't in the color I want. Product colors and manufacturing are hard problems... getting a fast food order right isn't.

The problem is the younger generations don't give a damn about their quality of work.

"Dad you're giving $4 for this meal, do not act like you're buying a $25 gourmet burger and hurry TFU"

I don't think I could get that right, what does "only cheese" mean exactly?

As someone who only orders cheese on burgers (although with the buns), it means they only want the sandwich to consist of the meat and cheese (hold all other toppings; so if it would normally come with pickles, hold those).

If I go through a typical drive-thru, I order it like this: "cheeseburger plain, with just the cheese" (varied slightly based on the fastfood chain in question). The first plain part removes all the other toppings (or plausibly all the toppings), the with cheese part confirms that you actually do want a cheeseburger and that you only want the cheese. I've found that specific order instruction to be the closest to universally working across all chains, while generating the fewest errors, after ~25 years of testing combinations.

Exactly.. if you don't say that part, they'll usually remove the cheese too. Similar on experimenting on how to order. "Diet Dr. Pepper" is another hard one, often you will get regular, or diet coke.

The dipping cup ranch, for those curious is because the ranch dressing has a lot of added sugar/carbs and the dipping cups are like 1.5g each. Severely diabetic and nearly 0 carb has been the only effective way to manage it well.

I worked McDonald’s drive thru as a kid and plain cheese burger meant bun cheese and meat. They even had a key for it on the POS, it was completely standardized.

Of course, it’s always possible some new employee would mess it up, or anything on your order actually. With turn over so high, there was no shortage of such errors.

I worked at a couple different McD's in my teens, was an opening manager at one for over a year at 19. Never underestimate nature's ability to build a better idiot.

No ketchup, pickles, onions or mustard.

Or bun

It’s happened. At the McDs I worked at we’d put the rest of the burger on the tray used for hotcakes.

It's just an order for gluten-free/keto burger and salad with no toppings other than cheese. Plus some tenders.

I actually don't think tenders is included in the order... I think they just ordered the ranch dip cups you would get if you ordered nuggets.

correct.. the dip cups are ~1g carbs per cup, the salad dressing packets are around 12g (mostly sugars) iirc.

> just the sandwich, only cheese, no bun

I wouldn't expect anyone to figure this out. Every fragment is a contradiction! Without a bun is it a sandwich? Only cheese already means no bun?

At McD, “just the sandwich” is code for “I don’t want the fries & drink meal package.”

(Cheese/bun part addressed in other comments.)

That's actually a bit confusing to me, not sure if you're doing that deliberately. First of all the "Double Quarter Pounder with cheese" [0] would be the name of the sandwich. Also do you want to remove only 1 bun or both buns? I guess you meant "not the combo", so maybe saying "a la carte" would work here.

[0] https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/double-quarter-po...

Yes, "with cheese" is part of the sandwich name, but because they don't have one that doesn't have cheese on the regular menu, when you ask for "plain" it often means they'll take the cheese off too. Also, there is only 1 bun, it's split in half with the burger in the middle and I don't want it at all.

Again, you'd be surprised how well orders can come out wrong and the way I do order it reduces that chance as much as possible. It's also less expensive to order as a meal with the side salad as a sub for fries, but that means more risk of the order being wrong in the end.

If I could order "Two quarter patties with cheese, ..." then I would do just that.

Please hold on, we'll connect you with our teleoperator.

"Hello this is Lakshmi, how may I help you?"

McDonalds trialled a remote operated drive-through a long time ago.

I think they found that orders were a couple seconds faster. Dunno why they didn't go forward with it: the outsourcing advantages are obvious.

Found the article: 2006 NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/technology/the-longdistan...

I think Wendy's did that for remote order takers... they found it worked better, and had more accuracy with dedicated/shared staff taking orders for multiple locations.

"Can I substitute the Artisan Grilled Chicken Sandwich for the Buttermilk Crispy Chicken Sandwich in Meal #6 if I don't get the fries?"

"Can I get a burger with two patties?"

Personally I usually just order what's on the menu but there must be lots of people asking for substitutions or modifications. That's the general public for you. I wonder how this "AI" is going to handle it.

Probably it will just pass the order to a human if it totally doesn't get it, rather than risk screwing it up too badly. Or maybe McDonald's has already figured out how much it will cost to re-do someone's meal versus having another human on the payroll.

This is where the engineers have an opportunity to hide the best easter eggs.

Instead of trying to teach the computer to understand this ambiguous order, what would happen is customers learn the UX of the assistant. It only takes one or two tries to figure out what words Alexa/McAI understands.

Judging by the interface you get with Uber Eats, I doubt it would be any better.

I imagine a person is more likely to get that wrong, yes you may get lucky, but also many low wage staffers especially late at night tired could easily be quite confused. Versus an AI that can be programaged on all the various terms people use and be programmed to ask for clarification consistently when a request is made that can often me more than one thing, and even take into factor things such as the location of the McDonalds and the dialects used there. Sure will start off very buggy but then presumably would only get better with more data.

I'll bet it's better the second time you order after it recognizes you hearing your voice, reading your license plate, peering at your phone or face.

WOULD YOU LIKE THE REGULAR, MR TRACKER1? DIET DR. PEPPER IS ON SALE THIS WEEK.

I'm also assuming that if the AI is having trouble, they just shoot the tasty food ordering mic over to a call center in the Philippines.