This little gem comes from Thrillist.com    A couple months ago I blogged about customers who are known by their actions rather than by their name, so here we have a story about The Mustard Guy.   I tried to imagine a condiment that would make this story even worse, but I think The Ketchup Guy and The Mayonnaise Guy would still pale in comparison to this guy, in fact I think he’d even out-gross the Worcestershire Sauce Guy.

We’re all fighting our own mustard war

“When I was in high school, I did my time at the local McDonald’s. The place was an extraordinary cesspit, but the worst was the mustard guy.

“He was a repeat offender of completely ignoring the protocol of entering the drive-thru lane by driving around the building and past the menu, a process which sets off an alert within the restaurant and lets someone know you’re there ready to order. Instead, he would swoop in from the other side of the lot and do a U-turn every time, ignoring the pressure pad and creeping up to the back window sideways. You’d have no idea he was there until he was banging on the window in a full-on froth, certain that the whole ordeal was YOUR fault for not just standing there at the window waiting for his arrival. Taking his pissed-off order was bad enough, but serving it to him at the pickup area was 1 billion times worse. When he was coming your way, you’d know it, because the order on the screen would always, always say:

“2 CH BRGR
only
MUSTARD
MUSTARD
MUSTARD
MUSTARD
MUSTARD
MUSTARD
MUSTARD
MUSTARD

“That’s right. He wanted his cheeseburgers soaked with mustard. They had to be sloppy, inedible. They had to smear mustard down the inside of the bag. The wax paper wrapping had to slide off, more mustard than paper. They had to be drenched with an insane amount of mustard.

“The grill people were familiar with him and had a method of pleasing him: they would basically soak the meat, put cheese on, soak the cheese, then soak both sides of the bun with mustard, then sort of fold it all together. By the time they were done, the whole place smelled like that nostril-stinging, antibacterial gel-smelling McMustard. You had to use a napkin to take the cheeseburgers directly from the grill person who made them (they would stain the metal chute otherwise) so you didn’t get the yellow dye all over your hands. They were terrible.

“One night, after handling this process flawlessly, I gave the guy his bag of mustard burgers. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that he lingered in the spot for a moment after I closed the window, but he slowly drove away. Minutes later, he was back, and I only knew this from the muffled screaming coming from the other side of the window. I carefully slid it open and there he was, a lap full of soggy, sloppy yellow food, mustard smeared all over his shirt and pants, mustard all over his steering wheel, mustard in his beard. And he was freaking out — about THERE NOT BEING ENOUGH MUSTARD.

“I calmly told him that we would make his burgers again, and the grill person handed me two of the nastiest balls of mustard bread I had ever seen in my life. We even filled a child-size drink cup with more mustard for him. I brought him the new ‘burgers’ and handed them to him with an apology, which he ignored. He opened the bag and inspected the mess, and then hit the gas and made it almost all the way around the corner before reversing, just to splatter the original, not-mustardy-enough burgers all over the drive-thru window.

“So that’s how I got to spend the rest of the night, standing out there with a spray bottle, scrubbing at globs of mustard in the crevices of the sliding window, stepping out of the way and waiting, covered in mustard and in tears, between the incessant parade of drive-thru customers. Because of this experience, I’m EXCEEDINGLY nice to people in service positions, probably to a creepy degree, even if they’re terrible or rude or whatever. It helps to remember that everyone is fighting their own mustard war.” — Jordan Waterston