Drive-thru communication is more often than not abysmal at best.
Every time you roll up to a McDonald’s, Wendy’s, or Taco Bell, you feel the need to yell into the intercom, enunciating with exaggerated diction, while trying to decipher crackles and feedback from the other side.
Half the time when you feel like you’ve made yourself clear, the order on the screen is completely different and you have to over-analyze every word you say to communicate what food you want successfully.
Granted, the convenience, ease, and simplicity more often than not outweigh the challenges of interpreting orders through an ancient intercom.
That is until robot language isn’t the only thing standing in your way.
A couple of English tourists in the United States posted a TikTok of their own experience ordering at an American drive-thru, and the combination of British accents and a Latino employee left a few things lost in translation.
The Brit in the driver’s seat successfully ordered a medium Diet Coke, but when it came to ordering a bottle of water, the word “water” tripped up the employee. Unfortunately, the woman ordering kept saying “water” in a heavy English accent. So it came out more like “bot-luh wah-tuh.”
She had to repeat it several times, adding in the word “aqua,” before the employee caught on and repeated back “wadder boddle,” with a hint of Latin flair.
The caption warns travelers not to order a water bottle unless they can do it in a perfect American accent.
Commenters from both continents swept in to make fun of both the American and English accents, many of them spelling out phonetically just exactly how each person in the video had said the word “water.” And frankly, amazingly, the same language can sound so different.
Most commenters were just obsessed with the battle of the accents that the duo had going on. Others just made fun of the order for saying “aqua” to get her point across instead of H2O or even the Spanish equivalent “agua.”
One gracious viewer pointed out that those McDonald’s intercom systems weren’t doing them any favors.
Several others swept in to make fun of the employee, comparing her to Sofia Vergara, teasing her for the way that she said the drink sizes or her misunderstanding of the heavy English accent on the other side of the intercom.
In reality, this McDonald’s employee represents the 22.9% of hourly workers who identify as Latino. According to Camino Associates, the Latino community in the United States makes up 17.7% of all minimum wage employees. The Leadership Conference Education Fund and LULAC note that these Latino minimum-wage individuals represent 25% of Americans who would benefit from a higher minimum wage. This means that Latino employees like the woman in the video are disproportionately affected by low minimum wage and high cost of living.
So the comment section could probably give this employee a pass for not immediately understanding a heavily accented “Wah-tuh” in her second language through an ancient intercom system.
After all, the woman got her water and a viral video out of it. No harm, no foul.
Published: Oct 28, 2024 11:11 am