Because the teenage wage slave at the register doesn't give a shit about your fine distinctions.

When I worked that McDonalds the machine was almost always down simply because the night crew didn't give a shit and it was too much effort to clean. I worked mornings with the old folks because I was too uncool for the night shift.

hey now, most of the people I see working at McDonalds are fully grown wage slaves. Chick Fil A and In and Out seem to be the main purveyors of adolescent labor these days.

"Good sir, it appears that our ice cream machine is down for scheduled maintenance, can I interested you in a piping hot apple pie perchance?" - teenage wage slave ;)

Morning shifts at McDonald’s were tough, especially on Sundays with the big post-church rush.

If you tell the customer "It's down" or "Down for maintenance" you will absolutely get some who tell you "Just turn it on for me and give me my ice cream". If you tell them "It's broken" then you don't get that.

Even though it's a valid distinction, I'm not sure it's one that's valuable to the interaction being described.

It's a simple way of shutting down the customer. Broken: non-negotiable. "Understandable, have a nice day"

As these kinds of places attract the pettiest and most annoying customers anything else would make the customers try to bargain with you, even for stupid crap like that.

It's unfortunately the way the interactions between individuals and organizations seem to be trending towards.

The flip side is that when you have a non-standard request to a business (like a bank) or a government agency, it used to be that a low-level clerk would have some workarounds, or you could escalate to a manager. Now, they all have a convenient excuse: "the system doesn't let me do that". And it's true, because it's all SaaS software with inflexible business rules, controlled by some central team that neither you nor the clerk will ever be able to reach.

Yep, which is why I get pissed off at manual processes in which people are strict and exactly comply with the rules and forms. One thing wrong, nope, cannot accept this document. Well then in that case those people are no better than a computer and I welcome the day they get replaced with one.

^this is the correct answer!

“Down” used in that sense is computer jargon. “Broken” is universally better understood, at the small cost of some accuracy which doesn’t matter to the customer.

No, that's by no means originated with computers.

People have said "the phone lines are down" for years, meaning landline phone service was temporarily unavailable (often when no actual physical cables were knocked down off of poles, etc, though that might be where the use of the term originated in that case).

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of using 'down' to mean the same kind of thing (all of which predated computer use being common in a regular person's life).

Iirc it goes back to telegraphs, the line been physically down would prevent them working and it’s hung around since.

Like hang up, when was the last time I hung up a phone, that style of phone went out of fashion here 30 or more years ago.

Ackshully it's from the even older phones with separate earpiece and fixed microphone. You'd really hang up the earpiece on these old ones.

You'd physically hang up wall phones, even when they had a combined microphone and speaker: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/515Mj67cq3L...

Yes, but what I meant was that the expression is likely even older than from the ones which went out of style 30 years ago.

It matters to me

Why? What are you going to do different if you are told it is broken versus down for maintenance? You're still not getting any ice cream?

The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre was sitting in a cafe when a waitress approached him: "Can I get you something to drink, Monsieur Sartre?" Sartre replied, "Yes, I'd like a cup of coffee with sugar, but no cream". Nodding agreement, the waitress walked off to fill the order and Sartre returned to working. A few minutes later, however, the waitress returned and said, "I'm sorry, Monsieur Sartre, we are all out of cream -- how about with no milk?"

Brings to mind the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure by Infocom where you start the game with an item called "no tea" in your inventory.

I don't get it.

Sartre believed that it was impossible to abdicate the responsibility of making choices, because to choose to do nothing is still a choice -- in other words, "nothing" is a kind of something. So one might humorously imagine that Sartre would also think that "no cream" is a kind of something that could be different from "no milk."

Excellent! I once went to a local burger place - they have a menu full of the various types of burgers, all loaded with everything. My kids are super picky, so I asked for a burger, with nothing except the burger and the bun.

Server looked confused - but which burger did I want? It became apparent that while I could ask for a preset item and ask for removals, I could not actually go fully off menu. So I had to ask for "the cheese burger, without the cheese" (as somehow distinct to say, the bacon burger, without the bacon). I laughed at the ludicrousness of that, but now I see they were channeling Sartre! In retrospect it would have been a truly beautiful absurdity if see had come back and said "sorry, we have no cheese, do you want no bacon?"

Like the scene from Five Easy Pieces with Jack Nicholson. He asked the waitress for an omelet with a side of toast. She says they don't have a side of toast, so he asks for a chicken salad sandwich, on toasted wheat bread, and hold the mayonnaise, the lettuce and the chicken salad.

I get the feeling that it's also easier for the cashier to put it into the point of sale / ordering system. There are buttons for specific menu items, and then buttons to remove things from them, but no buttons to build a burger from scratch.

I remember working at the drive thru for Wendy’s. I learned all about some clever orders that saved you $0.50-2.00 by ordering things a certain way. I can’t remember anything specific, but I remember one time asking, “so you want an X?” And they came back with “no, put it in exactly how I told you.”

In the ice cream situation, broken and down mean the same thing. In the Sartre anecdote, milk and cream mean the same thing.

No, it was a logic error on the part of the server. Since he requested without cream, their lack of cream was irrelevant.

One implies neglect or incompetence, the other implies a limitation of a system.

Some people would look down on a franchise or a restaurant or a business that had super high failure rates. Like if the comedy section of Netflix went down every 3 times you tried to visit that section. As opposed to Netflix having some system level limitation requiring them to perform some magical dance and perform some spell every few days to keep the server room from exploding.

You would perhaps give Netflix more leeway and not feel as much disdain and switch to a competitor if you knew that the comedy section being down every once in a while was some legitimate limit the engineers had found and not just a shoddy organization. But if you just got some nginx 500 error page randomly you would be like 'wow this site is hot garbage'.

Sir, this is a McDonald's.

This is McDonald's we're talking about. No one walks into one expecting spit-and-polish and Michelin-starred service.

Further if they told the customers that it was sanitizing itself they would assume that there would be an issue with the hygiene.

"down for scheduled maintenance" is phrase that's very common in the tech world but sounds weird in a restaurant.

Given the "entitled customer" incidents I've experienced, seen, and heard about, "scheduled maintenance" sounds intentional and like something "you shouldn't be doing when I want my ice cream", where "broken" sounds like something the guy behind the counter can't help.

I'd be willing to bet that "broken" is just less likely to start a fight with an enraged customer whose day was very slightly inconvenienced by their inability to consume extra junk food.