Welcome to 2022. Please Drive Thru. Here's Extra Napkins. You'll Need Them.

 What a wild year 2021 was… or two years?  Three?   From Trump to Covid and Black Lives Matter, school shootings, fucking Russia and everything in between it's felt fucking nuts for like 7 god damn years.  I used to write a Noggin on here almost every day.  In 2006, the first full year of the Noggins, I wrote exactly 365 of these damn things.  They weren’t all zingers but I was active.  Life was normal enough that an annoying coworker got a 3 part series on here.  Or that time my boss thought bringing doves into the office was a good idea was enough inspiration to clack away about it.   I feel like some crazy ass shit happens 20 times a day now and I really can’t stop and put together anything more than a Facebook post or tweet about it.    Frankly it’s overwhelming.  But there’s something I saw recently that I just had to pause and say something about.  It’s from a place we here at the Noggins have had a long- on again, off again, love-hate relationship with; the ol' yellow and red clown himself,  McDonalds. 

I recently scrolled passed an ad for this new thing called McDonalds Menu Hacks.  I thought it was some joke so I really didn’t pay much attention. I might have tried to subconsciously keep scrolling because it mentioned the Filet O Fish. Gross.  But it was later brought to my attention what all of this actually was.   It’s a legitimate marketing strategy by McDonalds for new ways to order their normal-ass menu items.  As a fast food aficionado I am very familiar with menu hacks and secret menus.   Usually they are a way to get an item at a lower price by mixing and matching or getting something you like that's not on the menu by editing the items it usually comes with.  Burger King made it their friggin motto "Get it Your Way" so what the hell was McDonalds trying to do?  This seemed similar but not the same thing as the Secret Menu made famous by In N Out.  Not to be confused with my In N Out “Fantasy Menu”  which was an early popular post on the Noggins which inspired it's own spin-off blog. An official Secret Menu is where the restaurant has sanctioned some unofficial menu items that they will actually make for you but are not listed on the menu.  You can tell the cashier “Animal Style Burger”  and they will know what it is, what to charge you for it and make it.  And there’s the main difference between the secret menu and this Hack Menu nonsense.    Imagine if the Double Double wasn't on the menu but you could still order it as a hack, but they give you two Cheeseburgers.  I'll explain what I mean.

Here’s what is going on with this Hacks menu and why after all the bullshit going on in the world right now I'm writing about this.  The items you can now order are:  Hash Brown McMuffin,  Surf & Turf, Crunchy Double and Land, Air & Sea.   Let's take a pretty basic one and show you why this is the fucking dumbest, most pointless shit ever.  

Hash Brown McMuffin is a Sausage Egg & Cheese McMuffin with a Hash Brown on it.  Simple enough, and I’m sure many people have gotten a McMuffin Breakfast Meal and put the hash brown on it already.  But now you can order a Hash Brown McMuffin from the “Hacks” menu and they will………. wait for it…….  Put a Sausage Egg McMuffin AND a Hash Brown, separately in your bag and charge you for a Sausage Egg McMuffin and a Hash Brown.   What the actual fuck?   What’s the fucking point?  To save 2 seconds and breathing  0.4 ounces of air from you having to order two separate things?   And if you're looking at the photo of the lineup above you can probably guess... it gets worse.  The Land Air & Sea is the President Trump of this lineup and it’s a Big Mac with a chicken patty and a Filet of Fish patty and whatever ever portions of the toppings that come on them ends up on it after you follow the instructions on how to build it.  But as you guessed it you’re buying three fucking sandwiches and throwing away four buns and whatever else falls off while you’re sitting in your car in the parking lot trying to carefully build this stupid, gross monstrosity.   Do people really order this enough they needed to make it an official thing? How would they even know people are doing this.  If someone orders a Quarter Pounder with Cheese and a 6 piece Chicken Nuggets, like I’ve been known to order from time to time, who’s telling them they’re gonna put the nuggets on the burger and call it a Crunchy Double?  Who decided to call it the Crunchy Double?   Was the McDonalds ad department just getting high and trying to think of crazy shit? That's actually not too different than how me and a couple friends came up with the Fantasy Menu I mentioned before.  Apparently people do order this crap.  Some of these and other creations have been popular on something called Tik Tok and McDonalds jumped on the bandwagon... in all the wrong ways.  This whole thing just insults my sensibilities as a civilized person in society.  

On the menu page it shows the items with a fun colorful bubble letting you know how cool it is to “Make it yourself”  YAY! … NO!!  That’s a bug, not a feature you dumb shits.  That’s like the main thing that makes this whole thing suck so much.  I mean, other than throwing away two halves of a sandwich for literally no good reason.  Oh and I just noticed that the Surf & Turf is only available for a limited time.  WHY!??  They aren't making anything!  "Can I get a Surf & Turf?"  Sorry we don't have those anymore that was for a limited time only.  "Uhh ok, can I get a double cheeseburger and a filet o fish?"  Absolutely, thank you, please drive thru...    It's- the - same - fucking - thing.  This is completely insane. Am I going insane?  Is this not fucking ridiculous?

 

I get it, having unique variations on classics is a great way to freshen up your menu but for fuck’s sake pay an employee a living wage and let them take the extra 2 seconds to add a fish patty to a double cheeseburger instead of making two fully made sandwiches and throwing them in the bag.   It’s not rocket science.    I dunno, it might actually be asking too much tho because once I tried a hack … a real one that I thought of myself, not this Hacks Menu bullshit. … I asked them to add a slice of cheese to my Big Breakfast with Hotcakes.  This way you can make a sausage egg & cheese McMuffin out of the sausage patty, scrambled eggs and muffin they give you, but now it has cheese.  Anyway the dipshit cook put the cheese on the pancake. Who puts cheese on a pancake? Who would ever think this is what the customer wanted?  Before it came out I saw the cheese on there and was getting ready to complain but the manager saw it and yelled at the cook in Spanish. “¿something something queso something pancake?”  He remade it and everything was cool and I got to have hotcakes, a Sausage Egg &Cheese McMuffin and a little left over scrambled egg for the price of just a Hot Cake Big Breakfast.  Another hack a friend of mine used to do was to order two $1 cheeseburgers; substitute Big Mac sauce and add lettuce. then combine them for a Big Mac for only $2.  You still throw away a bun but it’s an actual hack, with a purpose.  And that’s the thing tho right?  If you’re thinking your sneaky, coming up with a way to actually HACK the menu and you end up with extra buns or something it’s because it wasn’t a sanctioned official item and them's the beans if you gotta toss a bun, but now, from a corporate level they're legitimatizing throwing away food.  In 2022, It’s bonkers.  As far as pricing goes, since people were doing this shit before and McDonalds just decided to roll with it, I'm sure you're still getting charged full price for everything individually.  Hack, my ass. This was just dumb kids thinking they're being creative so they can get internet points. 

Creators of McDonalds realizing Ray Crock
totally fucked them in The Founder. 

In conclusion, it’s a stupid, stupid, wasteful, lazy marketing campaign coat-tailing an even stupider internet trend where McDonalds literally gets to do nothing but give a single name to ordering 4 separate things you have to build yourself while losing the satisfaction of it being a clever thing you think you thought of yourself.  It’s the fast food equivalent of putting an advertisement for the secret swimming hole location on a billboard and still calling it the “secret swimming spot”.   Well, McDonalds has never really been famous for not being a piece of shit company who underpays their workers and sells addictive shitty food to people like me.  I guess if you took the time to read the nutritional facts they post on the wall of the restaurant and watched the movie The Founder and are still OK with going there… I guess this bullshit shouldn’t surprise you(me).  

If you're wondering what they taste like you probably have never been to a McDonalds before.  But if you're still wondering, this guy ate them so you don't have to. 

I still haven’t gotten Covid as far as I know so there’s that I guess.  If this topic interests you, you’re probably a horrible piece of crap like me, but despite this, please still get vaccinated.  I love you.