New Brunswick — Everyone’s favourite public broadcaster has done it again: captured the imaginations of Canadians everywhere by writing up a witty and pun-filled account of someone or something going through a Tim Hortons, Starbucks, or even Burger King drive-thru in a new, interesting way.
“On a really slow news day we tend to just make up a fun drive-thru story,” said one anonymous editor. “Or like, if we had to publish a lot of ‘bad’ news, we soften things by telling people that… I dunno…Vladimir Putin rode shirtless on a polar bear up to a Timmies drive-thru window, and everyone loves us again.”
In February, intoxicated men went through a Miramichi McDonald’s drive-thru on a couch hauled by an ATV. The headline? “Quarter pounded.”
“Oh man, people ate that one up faster than a six-piece McNugget meal,” said the reporter who came up with it. “We all got together and started tossing puns around, and needless to say that was the only one that cut the mustard. The story went viral. Yeah, the men went to jail, but they still managed to inspire a nation of drive-thru renegades.”
In December, 2016, an Alberta man took a Zamboni through a Tim Hortons drive-thru.
“That story was shared more than 50,000 times on CBC.ca alone,” said a Calgary-based online editor. “It happened to be real, but I’ve made up crazier ones.
“We had been staking out that Tims for weeks, hoping for something really Canadian to happen, and we got ‘double-double’ lucky,” he added with a lame wink.
“Speaking of Canadian,” he went on unprompted, “Did you see the story we shared just a couple days ago about Mounties going on horseback through a Starbucks drive-thru? Pure motherf*#king gold. The headline was just OK… ‘Cappucino Canadiana’…I think I could have come up with something more click-baity but I’ll let it slide as I’m sure that newsroom was on a tight deadline.”
In January, CBC Newfoundland reported that three “thirsty” moose went through a Tim Hortons drive-thru.
“We used the headline ‘Make that a large?’, because, you know, moose are large,” said the reporter who wrote the story. “None of my stories has ever hit paydirt like that one, lemme tell ya! Turns out, people just love a goddamn drive-thru story. They literally can’t get enough of them…just like those three moose couldn’t get enough…triple-triples? Sorry, that was bad. I’ve gotten rusty.”
We asked several CBC reporters and editors whether they fear people are purposely staging their own drive-thru shenanigans in order to be featured in the news.
“Who cares if they are?!” one said. “A drive-thru story is a drive-thru story. No one cares whether it’s real. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve just received an anonymous tip that a school bus full of zoo animals went through a Tim Hortons drive-thru in Sackville. Sounds like an ‘imPAWSible’ situation! Just ‘PANDAmonium’! Do you think they did it on ‘PORPOISE’? How did they even ‘GOAT’ there? It’s sure to be very ‘EMUsing’!”