Recently, we asked members of the BuzzFeed Community to tell us about the wildest things they've seen while working the drive-thru window, and honestly, some of the answers left me completely confused. Here are the most outrageous responses:
1. "I was working at a Tim Hortons in Newfoundland when I was 15. A guy came up to the speaker box and ordered his coffee, and then I heard a weird noise that sounded like an elephant. He approached the window, and lo and behold, there was a baby elephant in the back of his pickup. At the drive-thru. On an island in Canada. I was so confused but just couldn't bring up the elephant in the room...or pickup bed, I guess."
2. "When I worked at McDonald’s, there was an off-duty cop in the drive-thru who stopped an attempted kidnapping. A man had left his kids in the car and gone inside to use the bathroom. A stranger tried to pull the kids out of the car, but the cop watched it happen and stopped it."
3. "Someone once tried to order just a raw hamburger patty. My coworkers and I couldn't figure out why they wanted a completely raw patty. Ultimately, my manager told them no because it was a health code violation and they just drove off. Still cannot figure that one out."
—C.L.
4. "One summer night, well after midnight, a car came in to our drive-thru, followed closely by a cop car. We took the first car's order, but the cop car drove past without ordering. The first car got to the window, and before they could get their food, another cop car turned in and blocked them in, lights on. We could see clearly then that there was coke EVERYWHERE — loose on the dashboard, in bags, everywhere. There were three guys in the car and a dog. The cops arrested the men and collected the evidence, but they couldn't take the dog — or the car, because of the dog. The car had to sit in our drive-thru until the Humane Society opened the next morning. Not the first time we had to block off our drive-thru, but definitely the most exciting."
—alli
5. "I had a minivan come in, and they had a pony in the back. They opened up the side door to show us."
6. "I once got stuck on the roof of a McDonald's while still taking people's orders through the headset. I'd gone up to sort out a water boiler that had tripped out, but didn't realize how high up the roof was, so I couldn't get back down the ladder. I continued taking orders through the headset despite having a full-on panic attack — tears, snot, fetal position, the works. A colleague had to come rescue me after I'd been stuck there an hour."
7. "I was working at a fast-casual Italian restaurant, and a woman came through the drive-thru and paid with a handful of silver dollar coins from the early 1990s. My boss, a 17-year-old, didn't know what they were, so I traded him for regular dollar bills and walked off with a much better deal."
8. "When I worked at McDonald’s in high school, we had a man pull up to the window after ordering just a large fry. Once I handed him his bag, he pulled a shoe from the passenger seat, poured the fries in the shoe, returned it to his foot, and drove away as if nothing was off about what he’d done."
9. "One time, I witnessed a man run over a traffic cone we were using to block off part of the parking lot. Another coworker and I went out into the rain to help him get the cone out from under his car. We finally got it out, the man drove away, and we put the cone back where it belonged. Two minutes later, the same man ran over the SAME CONE AGAIN IN THE EXACT SAME PLACE, made eye contact with me, shrugged, and this time kept driving, leaving the cone behind."
10. "While I was working at McDonald's my sophomore year of high school, some lady went through the drive-thru at about 1 a.m. Someone accidentally gave her a large Diet Coke instead of a large Coke or something, so she threw the drink back through the window. The drink landed quite heavily in the fry oil and splashed all over one of our coworkers. The girl drove away pretty fast, but my manager got her license plate number off the cameras. She was sued pretty badly."
11. "I've had multiple people drive through it in reverse. Kind of impressive, honestly."
12. "Once, when I was working the drive-thru at McDonald's, the girl in the passenger seat gave me a look to let me know she was interested. So I wrote my phone number on a napkin and put it in her bag. Fast-forward about three weeks to New Year’s Eve and I get a call at 2:45 a.m., and the caller says to me, 'If I find out you’re giving your phone number out again, I’m going to break your fingers one by one.'"
13. "I was working the drive-thru teller window at the bank one day when a guy pulled up with a fully clothed blow-up doll in the passenger seat. She was all buckled up and everything. I looked at 'her' and then at him, and he creepily said, 'It's so I can use the carpool lanes.'"
14. "I worked at McDonald's for almost two years. The strangest incident would have to be the kid who attempted to pay me in Pokémon cards by explaining how much each was worth on eBay. When I explained to him that his cards could not be used as currency, he became upset, accused me of being a 'dirty Yu-Gi-Oh fan,' and drove off, leaving me confused with both his cards and his food."
15. And this: "I was working the Starbucks drive-thru at 6 a.m. a few 4/20s ago. Two guys in their early 20s came by and got Frappuccinos. When they pulled up to the window to pay, I saw the passenger literally eating coleslaw out of a BUCKET."
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.