Auto-Pilot

Throughout high school I worked at Zaxby's, an aesthetically pleasing, slightly overpriced, fast food chicken restaurant.  The store at which I worked was right across the street from the high school, so of course most of our customers were of that demographic.  It was a fun place to work; most of the employees were also high school students and our oldest manager was 28.  This created a very laid back, permissive, fun atmosphere in the workplace.  Sometimes, one might say, too fun.  When work was as lassiez faire as my job at Zaxby's was, it was easy to go on auto-pilot, relying on only the most basic and repetetive instinctive functions to get you through the shift. 

So one night when I was the drive-thru cashier, as I stood in the little offset drive-thru station with my headset on, idly leaning on the counter out of boredom, the headset beeped to alert me to the car that had just pulled up.  "Thank you for choosing Zaxby's, this is Jake, how can I help you?" came automatically out of my mouth as I was surely preoccupied with what I was going to eat for dinner that night, what homework awaited me after I got off, or something of the like.  Not really paying attention to the customer, I let my fingers react to his order, pressing the appropriate menu buttons reflexively until I noticed he had stopped talking.  "Will that be all for you?" I asked.  "Yeah, that it," the customer said.  Normally I would have repeated his order, asked whether it was correct, given him a total, and asked him to pull around.  However, running on the intellectual auto-pilot that I was, I reflexively said "Okay, love you, bye."

It took me a moment to realize that auto-pilot was running the wrong program there.  What was worse, it seemed to take everyone in the store a moment too; the speaker for the drive-thru was audible loud and clear in the kitchen (so as to give the cooks a head start on the order) and they had heard every word, but for three or four seconds, everyone in the store stopped what they were doing and looked around as if they had just realized that they forgot to put on clothes this morning.  Then all at once everyone fell to laughing, myself included.  That night I realized what I had long suspected, that customers never really listened to what you were saying anyways, as they assumed it to be all as pre-programmed and ritualistic as it truly was; the customer pulled up to the window and I answered him with a red face and body language that screamed of restraining laughter.  He could surely hear the laughter coming from the kitchen.  I think he thought we did something nasty to his food.