McGinn: Why won’t McDonald’s give me my ice cream?

McGinn

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The elusive McFlurry.

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By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer 4:27 PM Thursday, December 29, 2011

Everybody in the whole wide world seems to love each other on Christmas Eve.

There remains no better proof than Christmas Eve 1914, when the British and the Germans decided to take a break from the gruesome horrors of trench warfare during World War I to have a little fun playing soccer together.

So, frankly, I feel a little embarrassed to admit that, on Christmas Eve 2011, all I wanted to do was lash out at the McDonald’s employee on the other end of the drive-through speaker.

I feel awful, to be honest.

How awful?

On a scale of one to 10 — 10 being the way a German soldier presumably felt after ringing in Easter 1915 by choking his Christmas pals to death with chlorine gas — I’d put my guilt at a solid six.

I mean, we all know the reason for the season, and, regardless of what I think, it’s not an M&M McFlurry.

But all I wanted was a delectable, 640-calorie ice cream treat during my family’s car ride to gaze at Christmas lights — and being told for the zillionth time that the ice cream machine was inoperable made me feel like a combination of Clark Griswold at the end of “Christmas Vacation” and Michael Douglas’ character in “Falling Down.”

In truth, I wanted to attack the LCD screen where your order appears.

“I know you can hear me in there!” I wanted to howl, grabbing the screen in a sleeper hold after an impromptu head-butt. “You tell Grimace that when I see that purple blob of a punk on the street, I’m gonna (expletive) him up!

“I’m gonna put that fat fool six feet under the hamburger patch for making me believe that the ice cream products at McDonald’s could be ordered all day, every day, any day! But, noooooo, I wait and I wait in your stupid lines only to be told the ice cream machine is down or broken or whatever.

“So you tell Grimace, he’s a dead man! Or whatever he is!”

I have this feeling that the kid working the drive-through wouldn’t have been at all scared.

“Who’s Grimace?” he likely would’ve asked. “I think he works at the South Lime McDonald’s.”

So, not wanting to spend Christmas Eve in the custody of Officer Big Mac with Hamburglar and a druggie caught stripping aluminum siding off of foreclosures, I kept quiet for the time being.

“Oh, I’ll get even,” I cackled to myself. “I’ll write a column about this.”

And here it is.

McDonald’s, I just want you to know that I’ve always stuck up for you.

When that “Super Size Me” movie came out, and everybody said that your intestines would turn into gravy from eating too much McDonald’s, I stood by your side.

But no more.

There are five McDonald’s locations in Springfield — and, at one time or another, I’ve had every one of them feed me this line about the ice cream machine being broken.

With 33,000 restaurants in 119 countries, it makes me wonder whether it’s a global problem.

If I ever travel to Croatia and visit a McDonald’s in Zagreb, should I be prepared to hear, “Stroj sladoled je dolje”? I’m also teaching myself to understand “ice cream machine is down” in the Hokkien dialect of Kuala Lumpur, too.

Well, I did a little investigative reporting and discovered there is some truth to what they’re saying.

But I also discovered that it apparently took less effort for NASA to launch the Hubble Telescope into space than it is to clean and/or repair the McDonald’s ice cream machine.

“Only certain people know how to clean them,” a former employee of the Derr Road McDonald’s revealed on condition of anonymity. “If this one girl wasn’t there, we wouldn’t have ice cream.”

Allegedly, they’re so expensive that management only gives a select few the awesome responsibility of caring for the ice cream machine.

“I don’t know what’s so special about the machines,” the ex-employee said.

She does know one thing.

“I used to get cussed out all the time,” she said. “They’d say they weren’t coming back. ‘Your ice cream machine is always broken.’ But they always came back.”

I suspect I’ll fall into that category.

Contact this reporter at amcginn@coxohio.com.

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