It’s a shame that this year’s Nobel prizes have already been handed out, because the award for Economics (and, frankly, for Peace), should definitely have gone to the 24-year-old who put together a tracking app that lets users know about every single broken ice cream machine at McDonald’s restaurants throughout the entire United States. That’s right, from now on, self-loathing, hungover losers like myself will no longer have to experience that sinking feeling you get when you stumble into a McDonald’s, smackdown your sofa-cushion change, and ask for an OREO McFlurry––only to be told that the machine is broken again.
A friend once told me that whenever a McDonald’s is claiming that their ice cream machine is broken (because seriously, how does it happen so often?), it really just means that nobody has cleaned it yet. And while I thought that broken ice cream machines were a personal conspiracy set out against me and me alone, I’m thrilled to learn that others shall now never be disappointed again (although, if you’re doing dessert at McDonald’s, umm…yeah).
According to The Verge, Rashiq Zahid, the 24-year-old software engineer (and genius), launched McBroken over the summer after his request for a sundae from a Berlin McDonald’s was cruelly denied. Rashiq first tested McBroken in Germany, which has around 1,500 locations. He biked to every single location in Berlin, placing manual sundae orders to determine if his bot was returning the correct information…which it was. And so he’s expanded to the US.
McBroken displays a map of every McDonald’s location in the US, represented by clusters of dots. Locations with a working ice-cream machine get a green dot; locations without one, a red dot. A column on the right compiles statistics — currently, 7.54 percent of McDonald’s ice-cream machines in the US are broken, as are 15.22 percent of those in New York.
I mean, this should be an issue on presidential platform levels. Seriously, I’d vote (no I wouldn’t) for whoever could fix ALL of New York’s broken machines. Hopefully, the McD bigwigs are TREMBLING over this app and get their collective shit together.
Pic: Instagram