About chaos

Tonight was truly a Chinese fire drill of a night.
Come along with me: Ang, Jayme, Julian, Caroline, Taylor, and McKenna go to Old Navy to buy Julian some summer clothes. They call me to see if we want to go. I call Greg and he does, he has to go up anyway for baseball practice at 7. So we all plan to meet at Northcrest Rally's for a hamburger picnic.
So we drive up after work and Ang, with a van-full, is already at the drive-thru window, and Matt (scheduled to take Caroline to ballet) is behind her. Tony drives up a little bit later.
I go to the walkup window to order. Greg and Tony have all the kids sitting at the tables. The Rally's is understaffed so I wait to order after two young couples and a toddler. The little guy is adorable, and the young people clean-cut, but every other word out of their months begins with "f." Not long after I order, three other people come in, two men and a woman, and I wonder if they're traveling--they have that distinctive Kentucky accent.
The people waiting with me at the walkup window are my new best friends. Because we are there a lloonngg time.
Ang gets her food so she drives away and Matt pulls up. I'm still waiting. Ang comes in because they forgot her fries. When she sees the lineup of me and my new best friends she forgets the fries and walks out. The guys are busy rounding up all the kids, because the girls are bouncing around the picnic area like mosquitoes. (Thank goodness it's fenced.)
Chaos seems to reign at this Rally's, because the sounds of rebellion are very clear in the waiting area. (And as Ang later observed that, "I think someone quit in the middle of it all," she was right, because I heard him.) The young man working the windows was so stressed his hands were shaking, and if I were him I would have quit too, because the place was making ME nervous.
My new best friends get their food and go outside to eat. By this time Matt has also gotten his food. While I'm waiting, two of my new BFs come back in because two of their sandwiches are wrong. One is informed that when he orders a "BLT," he indeed will only receive bacon, lettuce and tomato on his bun, because why would you expect a hamburger there too? So he asks, can he buy a hamburger? Indeed he can. (And they were very polite to the poor working people, dropping no f-bombs, but at the table later it was reported that on discovering the mixup, "they were yelling and cussing like crazy.")
If any of my new BFs were betting people I would have bet one of my sandwiches would be wrong too, but no one was interested.
When a sack was finally pushed out the walk-up windows, the other set of my new BFs, the Kentucky bunch, tried to claim it as their own, but were very confused that it did not seem to contain the sandwiches they had ordered; it occurred to none of them that it was not their bag at all but mine--I was sitting 10 feet away, but couldn't get up there fast enough to keep them from opening the bag and a sandwich to check it out. "It's mine, it's mine!" I cried--"Oh! No wonder," they said. As if I wasn't in line ahead of them anyway!
I grabbed it and ran to the picnic tables, starving, where everyone else was close to done, and the little girls busy throwing the bouncy balls that came in their kids' meals into the drive-thru lane.
Greg opened his sandwich and said, "Didn't I order a cheeseburger," and I said, "Yes," and of course his sandwich had no cheese, but I would have no more taken it back than applied to work there myself.
Ang mentioned the kids' meals came with hot dogs with everything, and who would think hot dogs aimed for kids' mouths would be like that? And the "everything" was sure easier to scrape off than get substitutes.
I like Rally's hamburgers the best of all fast food burgers. I think they taste the most like homemade. Come to think of it, the chaos ensuing at Rally's is close to home, too. Although no one has quit lately at home.