Spring is here again

You can always tell when it's spring, because the teenagers return to the Mighty Taco parking lot. The snow melts, the skies are less gray, and then one day you're driving past Maple at North Forest and the parking lot is full of Amherst teenagers, milling around their Jeeps and SUVs, talking, crowding around aimlessly; groups of eight or twelve of them go into the Mighty Taco and pack two full booths to chat for hours; only one or two actually make it all the way to the counter to order a small Coke or a single cookie.

The manager is always a bit grumpy about this. He shoos them away like a flock of pigeons, and then they come swarming back as soon as he goes behind the counter.

Nastiness

I wrote the following nastiness when I was grumpy in 1997. Someone mailed me to complain about it -- and I found out that it was in the top ten ranked results for "Mighty Taco" when you search on Google.

It's sobering to think that everything you have written is not only preserved for posterity by the Wayback machine, but also indexed conveniently by Google so everyone can see how dumb you are.

It appears to me that the average Mighty Taco counter employee has a mental stack size of one. The dialogue always goes like this. "I'd like four Mighty Tacos; hard shell, hot, sour cream and jalapenos, and a medium Coke."
"Ok, four Mighty Tacos. Um, that was... hard shell or soft?"
"Hard shell."
"Hot, medium, or mild?"
"Hot."
"And would you like sour cream?"
"Yes, and jalapenos."
"Ok.. and did you want anything else? Would you like a drink with that?"
"Yes, a medium Coke."

I would always speak the whole order, and they would always have to ask me the components one by one anyway. It was a little tiresome, but I've certainly stopped caring about this annoyance, which is, we'll all have to admit, completely trivial.

Daniel F. Boyd / boyd@csgeeks.org