You may recognize what I am holding in my hand. It is a half-eaten McDonald’s Big Mac. If you look closely, you should be able to notice two things:

1. Half-eaten food looks kind of disgusting, but half-eaten fast food looks especially disgusting.
2. There is only one beef patty in this Big Mac.

Look closely. You will notice the arrangement, top to bottom, is bun-patty-bun-cheese-lettuce-bun. They forgot an entire beef patty. They somehow forgot fully 50% of what makes a Big Mac a Big Mac and not a cheeseburger with thousand island dressing on it. 

What I find most puzzling about this is that there was cheese and lettuce between the bottom two buns, but no meat. It’s as if they skipped over that part of the assembly line when making this burger. Imagine taking a car home without half an engine (I think this actually happened to everyone who bought a Daewoo one year*)? You couldn’t, of course, but just imagine. It’d be terrible. This was terrible. This was my 1997 Daewoo Leganza.

Understandably, I was outraged. It happened on New Year’s Eve while I was working at the mall, and everything was definitely not sunny in Riverhead that day.

Hence, I have decided to draft a letter of complaint to McDonald’s in the hopes that I will receive suitable compensation, as I couldn’t think of a worse way to end my year than being shafted on an American classic. My letter follows.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am contacting you and the McDonald’s Corporation with a grave complaint about food I recently received at one of your locations. I have been a life-long consumer of your meals and, as a recreational athlete, can speak for its role in turning me into the man I am today. I’m also a working man, and this past New Year’s Eve I was ensuring the gears of American Commerce remained well-oiled while others were out “planning parties” and “taking the day off because they have real jobs”. That day for my meal break I chose, as I’ve done many times before, to partake in your Big Mac as my preferred means of sustenance.  I went back to our store’s break room, and with excitement I bit into my burger, but there was something uncanny about this particular Big Mac – and not in the cool, X-Men way. On second thought, you could say that this was the Jubilee of Big Macs: ill-conceived and unloved.

The problem, you see, was that this Big Mac was 50 percent the Big Mac it was meant to be. As you can clearly see in the attached photo, it was missing an entire meat patty. Now, I don’t want to come down on any of your employees – like I said, I’m a working man myself, and we all make mistakes. However, you can imagine my distress at receiving a sandwich that consisted of solidly 75% bread. Maybe if I had ordered a “Big Bread”, I would understand, but I didn’t. Also, please do not introduce a sandwich called the Big Bread.

Having only a 15 minute meal I obviously had nary an opportunity to go back to the Food Court and inform your employees of this oversight, so I soldiered on and finished this poor wounded burger off. I then toughed it out and worked the rest of my shift. However, it bears noting that my job pays only $9 an hour. I work hard for that money, and with the price of an extra value meal being what it is, it’s essentially worth an entire hour of work. Now, I’m normally willing to pay that much for satisfaction, but unfortunately on New Year’s Eve I only received half the satisfaction that I paid for. You could say that it’s hard to Protect This House™ with that kind of disappointment lingering over your day.

I hope that you and your company can address this situation. I plan to remain a loyal customer, as yours is the only burger establishment within walking distance, but I do reserve the option of switching permanently to wraps for lunch if this is not remedied.

Thank you for your time, I eagerly await your response.

Tino Evangelou

Concerned Customer

I think that this letter gets the point across without being too nasty. What do you guys think?

Stay tuned for next time, when I’ll probably have a follow-up to this sad, pathetic story and some more good stuff. No, like, actually good, maybe.

* – Not actually true, as far as I know.

Apparently not.  It ends on this cheery note:

Maybe I’m an OKCupid asshole for calling it that way. Maybe I’m shallow for not being able to see past Jon’s world title. I’ll own that. But there’s a larger point here: that judging people on shallow stuff is human nature; one person’s Magic is another person’s fingernail biting, or sports obsession, or verbal tic. No online dating profile in the world is comprehensive enough to highlight every person’s peccadillo, or anticipate the inane biases that each of us lugs around. There’s no snapshot in the world that can account for our snap judgments.

Well, yes. You are an asshole, that much is clear. If the date had been comically awful, it might have merited writing about (I’ve done it, before, except with names redacted because, you know, I’m not an asshole). But they weren’t. Jon Finkel sounds like a very successful dude who just happens to like a card game and be exceptionally good at it, and this was something the author couldn’t get over.  If the author’s point was to prove she is shallow and gets hung up on someone’s favorite hobby, and to sound like a ditzy asshole, then: Mission Accomplished!

It brings me back to my own tale. A few months ago I myself went back into the world of OKC. I was talked into it on the well-intentioned advice of a friend, and I wrote what I thought was a pretty genuine, funny profile about me and what I like to do, like play softball on weekends (in retrospect, perhaps it was a mistake to mention that in first paragraph). I got very little notice, once again, and got responses to my messages at a very impressive 0% rate (and I’m no creep in writing messages, in case you think I write “HEY NICE BEWBS WANNA BOEN?!).

As I’m apt to do, I once again swore it off, but instead of deleting the profile, I went ahead and turned my profile into a parody of what people want to notice about me instead of what I actually do, FOR THE LULZ. So I mentioned the fact I’m very tall three or four times as if it’s an accomplishment to be proud of, and also added in gems like this:

Favorite is such a limiting word – I take all life as to offer for its own, individual beauty. But I’m totally a fucking snob, so don’t push any of that pop shit on me.

And:

Pondering the complexities of life, finding myself as a 20-something New Yorker and making the most of it. I also used to tell everyone I played softball, but they didn’t get that by “playing softball” I meant “playing in a Fleet Foxes cover band”, so I should clarify that right now.

To my amusement and horror, I’ve gotten more views and more unsolicited messages since turning my profile into this awful, dickish parody, primarily from the crowd that loves tall guys (listing it isn’t enough, you have to also mention it repeatedly like a broken robot). Obviously, I don’t pursue any of them, because obviously the point’s been missed, because I hate the fact it took doing that to get any messages, and because everytime I’ve dated anyone with that fetish it’s ended terribly. God forbid someone likes another quality!

So, I suppose what I’m saying is, if you want to go into this with any hope of success, don’t mention that you play Magic, or slow-pitch softball, or that you get up on weekend morning to watch EPL soccer. Instead mention what everyone wants to hear, instead. At least, that’s the lesson this cynic takes out of this.

Or, just swear it all off altogether, and keep your Fridays open for all the Dungeon and Dragons you want!

I’ve decided to blow it all up with this blog and start fresh. The old posts still exist on the internet, but they’ve been cleared out of here so I can start anew and hopefully post more regularly. It’s not unlike a New Year’s resolution -an chance for an arbitrary endpoint after which I hope to produce more internet filler of varying readability.

To my friends who’ve come around these parts before, expect more of the same kind of “Always Sunny In Medford” vibe, except I’m going to try to keep it up more often. I certainly have the free time for it.

See you soon.