Ashton Kutcher, Come On Out!

Every time I go to the Farmville Dairy Queen, I feel like I’m getting punked.

 

Mind you, I’ve only been twice, but the service has been so bad both times that I feel like someone is playing a joke on me; like they’re going to hop out with a hundred dollar bill and yell, “GOTCHA!”

I have no issue with any other Farmville businesses. I have never experienced anything but fully satisfactory customer service at businesses such as Goodwill, Wal-Mart, Rite-Aid, etc. But this Dairy Queen has got something against me.

The first time I went to this Dairy Queen was when my boyfriend and I drove up to Farmville over the summer so he could tour the campus, as he’s considering Longwood as a university he’d one day like to transfer to. So, we had a nice jaunt around the campus and I pointed out the buildings he needed to know. On our way out of town we decided to stop for some ice cream at Dairy Queen.

The ordering process was not unlike the usual. The cashier wasn’t the sweetest lady in the world, but she did her job; punched our order in, took our money, and handed back our change. We both ordered chocolate malts; not at all a difficult thing to make. I know this because I worked as a soda jerk for a year in a diner. (Yes, a soda jerk is a real term. It’s someone that makes root beer floats, sundaes, shakes, etc.)

They finished our order and we picked up our cups. I glanced down at mine and saw that it wasn’t chocolate; it was vanilla. Now I’m not the kind of person so complain about little things like a dirty fork at a restaurant or cheese on my potatoes when I specifically asked for none. Little things like that don’t bother me, and I let them slide, but something as easy as making a chocolate malt when you only have three flavors of malts is a mistake that should be avoided.

I politely said to the woman that had taken our order, “Excuse me, I asked for a chocolate malt.” She looked at me and said, “You didn’t specify what flavor you wanted.” I was taken aback and responded, “Yes I did, I said I wanted chocolate. It’s no big deal though, if you could just put —” She then proceeded to snatch my malt back and said, “Yeah, sure.”

Making a malted shake chocolate is not something that is difficult. Three squirts of the standardized chocolate syrup, mix it, and it’s a done deal. She made it sound like it was heart surgery. Let it be said that this DQ was not busy; we were two of maybe five customers. I was polite, and even if I didn’t specify what flavor I wanted (which I did), it wasn’t my fault that she didn’t ask what flavor I wanted. Plus, who gets a vanilla malt? Only old men, as far as I’m concerned.

 

 

The second instance at this Dairy Queen was this past Oktoberfest Saturday. Erik and I went to Dairy Queen because I was craving the hell out of a cookie dough blizzard. So, as the usual sequence of ordering a blizzard goes, I specified to the young man who was taking my order what size I wanted and what flavor. Suddenly, before he told me my total, he yells out, “F***!”

I turn around and look at Erik. We share a “surely-this-can’t-be-happening-again” look, both in disbelief of this kid’s outcry on the job. His manager looks over her shoulder and asked, “What?” I know that if I had yelled the “F” word at any of my past jobs (maybe excluding Tres Amigos Mexican Restaurante) that I would have been fired on the spot. This manager did nothing.

The cashier exhaled heavily and said, “It didn’t register her cash. I put in ten dollars cash and her total was four sixty-six. And the thing just… it just… JAMMED ON ME!” The manager, though she didn’t scold him for cursing on the clock, responded adequately for the situation. “Well,” she said, “Do the math.” That being said, he stared into space. No apology to me, the customer, whatsoever. I sighed, took out my phone, and calculated my change. The cashier said “oh” and handed me a few crinkled bills and some coins.

 

Wow, this blog turned out to be a lot longer than I anticipated for the whole thing being a complaint about an ice cream joint. Anyway, it was ridiculous. Farmville needs a charming little ice cream shop; they have charming little everything else.