On one hand, it seems a little pointless to review a fast food chain restaurant, especially since I try to avoid fast food whenever I can because it's really not practical to find something that's not too bad for you. Fast food is fast food, right? What's there to review?
But dear, dear friends, stay away from this Wendy's, even if you love Wendies in general. It is cursed.
Both of us were working late yesterday, so I ran out to grab us Wendy's so we'd at least have something hot to eat, and the resulting tour through the drive through of the damned had me looking over my shoulder wondering when Vergil was going to appear and offer to act as my guide.
I should mention that I've consistently had a terrible experience at this particular Wendy's for all the years I've lived in Branford. Most notably, they almost always get the order entirely wrong, and they will never give you an itemized receipt (y'know, so you can check that they got your order right without digging through the bag before you leave), but it's the closest fast food to the house or I wouldn't even have ventured out to find that it was, somehow, worse than I remember.
First of all, there was a line of about seven cars waiting for food or to order, not because Wendy's is so popular late on a Sunday evening but rather because of the glacial pace with which orders were being filled.
When I finally pulled up to the intercom box which, I found, was still as broken as ever, emitting bursts of static so hideous that I felt compelled to flinch away in case it started firing sparks and molten plastic at my car. The fellow on the other end obviously hated being at Wendy's even more than I did, and he made that eminently clear when I tried to order food. He also had apparently spent as much time and effort at work that day as I had, since he was simply unable to muster enough energy to enunciate a single word that dropped from his exhausted, world-weary lips.
In a contradiction worthy of Shakespeare, though, he combined his slurred, exhausted speech with a consistent attempt to rush me through my order, and this is where the experience started to feel surreal. He was under some kind of desperate pressure to take my order as fast as he possibly could--despite the fact that there were four cars in between me and the food window--while simultaneously refusing to speak clearly enough that I could understand him through the staticky box without multiple requests to repeat himself. He also let me say the first three or four items from my order before interrupting me to ask me what the first one was, at which point items began to appear on the screen in some kind of sci-fi time shift, out of sync with reality. As I repeated myself, he continually interrupted me with an urgent-but-yet-somehow-still--slurred "whillthacompleeyororduh" after everything I said, and occasionally *during* things I was saying.
I got so frustrated that I finally said "yes" before my order was over. I seriously didn't even order all the food we wanted because between the rushing mumbler and the time-bomb intercom, I either needed to leave or take a tire iron to the shrubbery next to the drive-through.
Of course, I still had to wait for the next four orders to actually be filled before I finally got to the window.
This Wendy's is the worst. They get your order wrong all the time, and every once in a while they save up the incompetence for an experience as special as mine was last night. read more
