10 Struggles Every Fast Food Lover Has To Deal With

1. Getting gypped on dipping sauces for your chicken nuggets.

What the hell, fast food employees? Are you financially invested in the store’s supply of dipping sauces? Do you have some kind of dry nugget fetish? Do you hate satisfying customers? McDonalds offers 20 nugget meals but then they want to give you like two sauce packets. People don’t want to be bashful when dipping; they want to drench their nuggets in BBQ (or whatever) and indulge without a care in the cholesterol. There’s nothing more brutal than scraping your nugget along the residue glazed walls of that packet, hoping for the slightest hint of sauce flavor.

2. Late night eating will either provide the best or worst quality food. (Usually it’s the worst.)

The highest of highs and lowest of lows are experienced — especially with French fries. It’s like all fries served after 11pm are either fresh out of the fryer because they had to make ‘em specially for you or they’re stale, lukewarm, flaccid disappointment potatoes. This isn’t the only late night dining issue though…

3. The ice cream machine shuts down.

What is it about darkness that makes fast food joints think it’s acceptable to “shutdown” an ice cream machine? Hey, food establishment owners, you know when it’s appropriate to turn a mechanism capable of generating delicious frozen treats off? When you’re willing to have your underperforming brain removed and donated to science so they can figure out where horrible ideas come from.

4. Worrying that on any given day an employee did something incredibly disgusting to your food, like this:

5. Exclusivity issues.

Some menu items can only be found at specific places and if you have a taste for food or drinks from multiple restaurants, you have to experience multiple drive-thrus to piece together your desired meal. Taco Bell’s Mountain Dew Baja Blast is a prime example of something that needs to be available EVERYWHERE.

6. Which window?

This is incredibly minor, but I always get anxious wondering “Did they say to pull up to the first or second window?” every single time I’m in a drive-thru. Would it be a crisis if I happened to go to the wrong one? Hardly, but I’m also self-conscious about the speed of my windshield wipers in comparison to everyone else’s windshield wipers so…

7. Getting Catfish’d.

There are two ways you can be Catfish’d at a fast food restaurant:
1. The commercials deceive you. The sexy burger shown on TV isn’t the flimsy mediocrity you receive in person. (Carl’s Jr/Hardee’s is one of the few establishments who can be trusted to look as good in person as it does on TV.)
2. The voice heard over the intercom that takes your order sounds like it belongs to a person who looks a certain way, but when you pull up to the (first or second??) window, they aren’t at all what you’d imagined.

8. Incorrect order.

Luckily I’m an impatient fatty who digs in the bag immediately after receiving it, so rarely does an error go unnoticed. However, when it does happen, there’s nothing more frustrating than getting home and missing a taco or accidentally being stuck with some monster’s nauseating, mayonnaise drenched burger.

9. Trying to eat healthy is just a torturous experience.

Fast food is everywhere, so you can’t really go outside without being tempted to disregard diets. Imagine having to see all of your exes every time you drive down the street? And they’re all waving you in, saying, “Hey, come here and have me. I won’t take nearly as much effort as preparing something homemade would. Also, I don’t require dishes.”

10. Repeatedly burning your mouth on hot food because you don’t have the willpower to refrain from eating.

When you love eating, hate waiting and are constantly in fast food drive-thrus, the occasional burned tongue comes with the territory.