NIKA LEANDRA'S BOOKS

Say What? - "Oh, my God!" or to make light of it, "Oops, it happened again", are usually my kind of reactions as far as being served at fast food restaurants like Dunkin' Donuts, McDonald's, Subway, etc. I wish I were talking about foreigners from whom you might expect mistakes due to language problems, but no, this is about young genuine Americans who are screwing up more than ever. Just the other day I, a foreigner myself, went to a local Dunkin' Donuts' and ordered "One sesame bagel with cream cheese and another sesame bagel plain in a bag." Then I paused and watched that young blond 20- year old girl punch my order into her machine before I continued, "And a small tea with lemon, please". She asked me right away, "No sugar, sweetener or milk in it?", whereupon I raised an eyebrow but replied anyway. "No, nothing else but lemon." Another half question,"The bagels toasted?" made me wonder if I should perhaps have added that right away. "No thanks, neither one toasted please", I said. Now, guess how many she got right. Yep, one out of three, and that was the tea. Okay, so I got a toasted sesame bagel with cream cheese and a plain bagel in a bag. Honestly, how difficult was that? On a scale from 1 to 10, where would you have put this relatively simple order? Besides, there was no one in there but me, so no excuse as far as stress. A 1, maybe a 2, or a 3 if you really want to be polite? Look, I was a waitress myself as a student, and I'm not saying that I was the fastest and swiftest, but if I had taken wrong orders like that, I wouldn't even have survived day one. Unfortunately, this is not a single case or an isolated incident but happens more and more frequently. And to be honest, this doesn't just worry me but truly scares the heck out of me! Do managers of fast food places just randomly pick their staff, I wonder? Generally speaking, ignorance seems to be the name of the game here, but still don't huge profits come from good and fast customer service? I'm not out to collectively target students and college kids, but experiencing these oops more and more often really concerns me. Is this going to be our future, dumb and careless, or should I rather say care- free? God, I hope not as the thought alone is bleak and depressing! Forgive me if I blow into the same horn again, but what is all the money supposedly spent on education for if dumber than dumb is the actual outcome? Math, for instance, should be mastered by a school graduate at least in its basics without even having to mention it. However, shockingly enough, every second teenager apparently struggles to adjust to any other change sum than shown on the display of their cash registers. I generally dislike breaking a $10 or $20 bill over a few cents but rather prefer to go through my change and put out the exact amount of coins. Almost every time I do so, the young folks across from me put on that confused and distressed look. I've had to help out lots of times, which I really don't mind doing, but it's just not my job to do that. School and college education is apparently nothing but a big farce in this country, and even though the government has promised to change the US educational system, I honestly cannot see any improvement whatsoever. Quite on the contrary, what I've been witnessing the last seven years is anything but progressive advancement but clearly regressive development. - Now I'm beginning to wonder really, how many times I've ordered Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi and might have ended up with regular soda instead. Just saying!