I have noticed a disturbing trend in the amount of napkins passed through a fast food drive thru window.
Namely that the amount is decreasing as time goes by and occasionally, none make the passage from restaurant to car. That’s right, no napkins what. so. ever.
This is a photo of a kid taken by another kid. According to the bag in her hand it is clear that both of them will soon be in the need of many napkins. I had no idea this picture was being taken, I was driving. (Side note: When you save a million photos you really can find a picture for everything…)
Possibly you are mentally praising these fine establishments for their environmentally friendly practices as well as their money saving techniques. Fine, sure, that’s a factor. In fact I’m sure that piles of math people put a bunch of factors together and decided that if they stopped handing out napkins to poor deserving mothers, they would save 7,00,000,000 trees per year.
But here is some math of my own for you.
3 kids+ 1 moving vehicle+ any kind of food = the need for 5,678 napkins per child
Possibly some of you are mentally scolding me for letting my children eat in the car or eating from fast food establishments to begin with. I’d argue that point except the thought of not feeding my kids while driving made me snort diet coke out my nose with laughter.
No.
Not an option.
Question: Solve for X, 3 kids + 1 truck + 4 hours of driving + X = 30 min of quiet
Answer: French fries
Possibly you are thinking we could use our own hand towels. And I have! I have wiped up ketchup spills with dirty socks and mopped spilled drinks with shirts I found crammed under the seat and used the pants that were still in the back from the last major food catastrophe to clean up the current one. But you know what happens to those lovely reusable bits of cloth.
Nothing.
Because if I were the kind of person who took everything out of the vehicle once we got home, I wouldn’t have had any “napkins” to begin with.
Question: If one mom has two hands and three kids have six hands and there are 45,689 items in the truck that should come into the house and mom has to pee, how many things make it through the front door?
Answer: 7: a cell phone, two “don’t-touch-it’s-special-to-me” toys and four pieces of junk mail.
And one final math problem for you.
Question: If three kids change their orders 3.4 times each, what is the percentage chance that the mother will also remember to ask for napkins when picking the food up at the window?
Answer: 0%
Extra credit: How many orders will she get wrong?
Answer: 1.3 but only because the kids changed their mind again after the order was placed.
In conclusion: Give a mother some napkins! The math says she needs them.
Behind the Willows 
Can you imagine this problem X2? 6 kids with food in a moving vehicle!! I understand your need for napkins!!
Ahhhhhhh!!!! Once my grandma said that if she passes on and goes the wrong way she’ll know because she’ll be in her old car in the summer, no air conditioning with all eight of her kids. 😀 And if that’s the case I’m sure there won’t be a napkin in sight either! 😀
Any extra napkins go in the glove compartment box where we keep all the important things like proof of insurance and napkins.
😀 Ha, exactly!
Hahahaha! Kids eating in a car without napkins? That is definitely a catastrophe waiting to happen 😂 I’m glad you at least got a Diet Coke out of it!
🙂 Diet Coke does make most everything a bit better. 🙂
If I ever work a drive through I’ll keep this in mind.
ECHO ECHO
Mothers will silently thank you everytime someone spills!