Would You like Meat on that Burger?

Call it what you will - a McStake, a McScrewup, or drive-up dupery, we've all been there. You drive up to the fast food drive-thru, speak your order to the pleasant-sounding disembodied voice that repeats it back to you while you watch your order accurately appear on a display screen. You pay at the window, collect your bag of food from an even more pleasant person who wishes you a nice day, and you drive off.

Does life get any simpler than this?

Well, yes. It's called looking in the bag before you drive away.

Life can go from "queen of the drive-thru" to "chump of the cheeseburger" in the time it takes to drive home, open your bag and say, "I'm not lovin' this."

There appears to an epidemic of fast food foul-ups these days, of which I have had my own share, the most recent involving a salad swindle. I had driven to the local drive-thru, ordered my favorite entree, an Asian Chicken salad, was handed what was obviously a salad from the shape and feel of the bag, and drove home. When I got home, I opened the bag, eager to dig into my pea pods and mandarin oranges, only to find no pea pods or mandarin oranges. A closer look revealed that I had been slipped a Bacon Ranch salad instead of the Asian Chicken.

I don't know why, at my age, I have not yet learned to look into an opaque package that a complete stranger hands me, even if it is from a cheerful, cherub-faced restaurant worker. Particularly when roughly 40% of the time similar packages have contained missing food items, like hamburgers without pickles, fish fries without the fries, and sausage breakfast sandwiches mysteriously sans sausage.

And we haven't even mentioned the great condiment con. Who among us hasn't gotten a mile down the freeway only to find no creamer for your coffee, no tartar sauce for your Fishwich, and worst of all, not even one of the three whipped butters you specifically requested for your warm cinnamon roll?

And then there are the dubious signs appearing at some drive-up windows that read: "Condiments Given Upon Request," which cause me to wonder if that refers to all condiments or just the more universal ketchup and mustard? Must we all now play tartar sauce roulette?

Some restaurants now put the condiments in your coffee for you. I discovered this at a McDonald's in Indiana recently when my husband and I decided to try their new gourmet coffee.

"How many creams would you like in your coffee?" the drive-up server asked.

Not knowing how large their small coffee was I asked, "How large is the coffee?"

Rather than showing me the size if the cup the employee held her fingers apart, "About this big." I gambled on three, and one sugar. Surprisingly the coffee was condiment-ed just to my liking. But it did have me a little nervous for a few minutes. Plus I just don't like the idea of people I don't know fiddling around with my coffee. Maybe I've seen too many disgruntled employee documentaries.

Later that day we had lunch at a deli, both of us asking for chips with our sandwiches. Upon opening our styrofoam containers we found one completely devoid of chips, and the other with a large mountain of seasoned wedge fries.

Had we known we were going to get fries, we wold have asked for ketchup.

Not that we would have gotten any.