We were at the Las Vegas airport, heading home, and decided to get something to munch on. In that terminal, there’s an Einstein Brothers Bagels stand, so after asking my wife what she wanted, I stepped up to the counter. There was one woman taking orders and another preparing them.
I told Woman #1 that I wanted an asiago bagel with nothing on it, not toasted. She hit the button for that bagel, then asked, “Do you want it toasted?” I told her no, but I had two other items to order. She asked, “Will that be all?” I told her no, I also wanted a sesame bagel with chive cream cheese, not toasted. She nodded, repeated the first half of what I’d just said, then asked again, “Do you want it toasted?” I told her no, but I’d also like another sesame bagel with plain cream cheese, also not toasted. This time she didn’t ask me about toasting, instead opting for “And that’s with chive cream cheese, too?” I told her no, just plain cream cheese, and this completed my order. She hit a couple of extra buttons, I paid with my credit card and stepped to the side to wait for our food.
As soon as my order spit out on the paper register in front of Woman #2, she reached into the asiago bagel bin, put one in a bag, and handed it to me with a thank you. I thanked her, but reminded her this wasn’t my entire order, to which she replied, “What did you have?” Suppressing the urge to tell her to look at the damn piece of paper, I told her about the other two. She responded by immediately cutting up two sesame bagels and putting them in the toaster. “No,” I shouted, “I don’t want those toasted!” She fumbled with a knife trying to retrieve them, but the bagels were already too far along on the toasting conveyor. She looked at me with a shrug as if there was nothing she could do about it. Then, before I could say anything else, a light bulb went off over her head as she came to the realization that she could take two other sesame bagels out of their bin and use those. Which she did, and managed to get the rest of my order correct. Then she put each of those bagels into little bags and handed them to me.
I don’t get the separate-bags-for-each-bagel thing (why not save some paper by putting all three items in one bigger bag?), but at this point, I was happy to have finally gotten the food we wanted, so I chalked it up to yet another day in my continuing battle with customer service in America.