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What kind of moron engineers are they hiring these days to design fast food drive-thru's?

The two closest fast food joints to my place are a Wendy's/Tim Horton combo and a McD's. They're right across the street from each other and you take your life into you hands trying to order grub from either one.

Even though they’re in the same building, both the Wendy’s and the Tim Horton’s each need to have their own drive-thru. That, in of itself, is okay, but for some reason that is unfathomable to me they’ve decided to completely encompass the entire building with the drive-thru’s. It is physically impossible for a pedestrian to enter the premises without running the risk of being run down by either some hungry senior citizen with a craving for a Big Classic and a baked potato or a donut starved cop with the lights and siren on. Now I’m not positive but I would think that both Tim Horton and Dave Thomas are rolling over in their grave at this very moment because of the imminent danger to (and potential lawsuits from) their customers on a daily basis. The sad part is that if you look at the site, it was really not necessary to circle the entire building. There’s lots of room to merely run the individual drive-thru’s along either side of the structure.

A far worse situation however, is across the street at the Mickey D's. They recently added a “split and merge” to the previously straight drive-thru. I have no idea what they were smoking or what they could possibly have been thinking when they dreamt this idea up. It defies common sense. Now, rather than having each automobile wait their turn in a nice, straight line, half the cars are expected to veer off the main path, place their order and then attempt to merge back into the main line to receive their food. The designer must have been some bleeding-heart, tree-hugging; ninny, who actually believes in the kindness of strangers, fairies, and that the occupants of the first line will graciously let you back in line after you have placed your order.

Quite to the contrary, in practice (during the supper rush) the driver of the mini-van beside you would sooner ram their bumper down your throat than be forced to spend 30 seconds more than they have to in a vehicle filled with whiny, hungry kids screaming at the top of their lungs for their “grease burger kids-combo with the cheap plastic toy”. Only God himself could possibly comprehend the rationale behind this design. Does it in anyway increase the number of burgers they can sell? NO! It can’t possibly speed things up because the slow part of the drive-thru process has never been the ordering portion. The slow part has always been at the window where you have to wait for the snotty-nosed, pizza-faced, kid to figure out what size button to push on the drink machine for the big cup and attempt to count the number of burgers in a Big-Mac combo.

On the other side of town, the intellectuals at McDonald’s have fashioned a drive thru with no less than six windows. Unfortunately, there is only one speaker from which to place your order, and because it is only a single lane, there is no way to advance to a vacant window other than to wait for the car in front of you to complete their transaction and leave. Effectively rendering five of the six windows utterly useless.

The only hypothesis I can come up with is that the recent dot-com crash left us with far too many unemployed web-designers whose complete lack of marketable skills landed them jobs designing fast food drive-thru’s.