Drive-Thru Confessional

As busy people with self-imposed hectic schedules, we love a good drive-thru. Using the drive-thru allows us the necessity of ordering, consuming, and cleaning up without ever having to park or exit the car. We don't even have to dress for the occasion. Get it and go; it's the American way. Thank you, McDonalds.

But during that brief moment of respite in which we allow ourselves some measure of nourishment (be it ever greasy, fried, or otherwise harmful to our overall health), I can't help wondering what kind of consideration we give to those whose voices float out to us garbled and mostly incoherent from the screen reading "Order Here."

Sure, we don't mind telling them which value meal or combo pack we're going to have for dinner. We don't mind telling them we want no onions or that we want to supersize it. But what happens after they take our order? What happens when we think they've gone? What kind of information are those disembodied voices privy to?

We always assume that as soon as they take our order they are gone, and we don't necessarily consciously make the connection between the voice in the box and the person at the window. Do they hear us berating other drive-thru patrons for ordering too much? Do they hear us venting about bad bosses, failed friendships, luke-warm marriages? Do they hear us discussing health problems or politics? Religion and the weather?

Do they ever hear things that make them want to spit in our order?

We take for granted that the drive-thru affords us some element of privacy. Our cars are safety zones, impenetrable despite our daily grind. We think our cars preclude us from interaction with what's outside them (maybe this is why people so diligently pick their noses while they drive, but that is a whole other blog). What we fail to think about is the implicit contract of communication that we enter into as soon as we respond to the question of whether we want fries with that. By inviting that voice into the vehicle, we are, whether we intend to or not, allowing that drive-thru worker into that particular moment of our lives. No wonder so many of them seem so disgruntled.

Anything I Can Do You Can Do Weirder

Privacy is not something guaranteed to us, but it once was a general consideration we liked to make for each other. The world was once a place in which we didn't know everything about everyone, and we didn't need to know everything about everyone. At what point this changed I couldn't begin to guess, but now it seems that the opposite is true: we don't just need to know everything about everyone, we feel entitled to know. And a big thanks to the various social networks, as well as reality tv networks like Bravo, for allowing us these all-too-familiar glimpses into each other's lives.

Don't get me wrong: I love reality shows (inasmuch as they are reality) and Facebook just as much as the next person. However, I am also one of those (few it seems) people who believe in censoring myself. My life is not what I would call fascinating enough to chronicle every bit of it for perusal via hourly status updates, and Facebook will never encapsulate who I really am. But I do indulge in the connectivity, and I have been known to watch a Real Housewives show or two. How could I help myself? Everyone else was doing it.

And although many reality television shows are innocuous (hardly bringing more than bad role models and media-driven substantiation of stereotypes to the table), it's shows like Hoarders and My Strange Addiction that seem to warrant a closer look at why we want to know what we want to know. What is the attraction? Why do we get sucked into these shows that chronicle people with psychological problems? Certainly there are people suffering from these afflictions who never make it onto tv. Do we care about those people? Do we even notice them in real life?

I can't help wondering if we aren't mesmerized by these shows because they make us feel better about ourselves. We see these people grappling with issues like eating couch cushions or collecting hair from shower drains, and it makes us feel a little bit better about our own idiosyncrasies. We see the hoarders or the messiest house in America, and it makes us not feel so guilty that the supper dishes are still soaking in the sink or that the dusting has been neglected for another week.

It's been suggested that in order to captivate an audience with the attention span of 140 characters, the action has to be extreme. There is no room for middle ground. We don't want to see shows about average people. We want to see the extreme versions of ourselves, what we would turn into if we just let go. Is this why we feel justified as spectators? Are we just trying to keep ourselves in check, or have we in our quest for never-ending connectivity convinced ourselves that this is entertainment?