Oct. 27th, 2005|12:56 pm: Went to Wendy’s for lunch today and the same guy who gave me $1.00 too much in change last week took my order. The total was $4.93 and I give him a $5 bill and say, “And here, I have 3 pennies.” and I quickly select 3 pennies from a handful of change and give it to him. He’s already put the $5.00 into the register and the digital display shows that he owes me 7 cents. He stands there with the 3 pennies in his hand, staring blankly at the register. After what must be 30 seconds, I finally tell him, “You owe me 10 cents.” and he says “Oh!” and hands me a dime. How has he kept a job there for so long? His drawer must come up short/over every day if he gets that easily confused.

It reminds me of this time at McDonald’s drive-thru…I posted this on the notla.com forums on September 6th, 2001 - here’s a copy & paste of the incident: This isn’t a complaint really, just kind of a stupid incident that happened to me at the East Alton McDonald’s. I went through the drive-thru and placed my order. The total came to $7.35. When I got to the first window, a high school kid told me it’d be $7.35 and I handed him 35 cents, a twenty and 2 ones. He closed the window and started to put in in the register.

Then he opens the window and says, “It’s only $7.35 - you gave me $22.35 here.” I told him I realized that and he says sarcasticly, “Well here’s $2.00 of your change!” and tries to hand me the 2 ones. I tell him I’d rather not have the ones and just to take it out of the $22.35. He looks at me for a second and shuts the window. Then he calls a friend over and I see him explaining to him how I must be retarded, holding up the money and motioning towards me.

THEN he punches the $22.35 into the touch screen register and sees my change is $15.00 even. He stares at the screen for a minute, pulls out a five and ten and hands me my change without saying thank you and not looking directly at me.

I don’t blame the guy really, he’s just a high school kid who’s probably never had a register job before. He could have tried not being quite so rude about it, or at least said “thank you” when he realized his mistake. But at least it gave me a laugh for the day.