Dolts at the drive-thru

This is what we get for letting boneheads drive. Carloads of them are rolling up to drive-thru windows across the country to pull off the latest breakthrough in jackass humor, which requires inflicting harm on the staffer who hands them their order. The driver takes a drink from the employee, yanks off the cover, and then hurls the cup’s contents back at the worker, yelling, “Fire in the hole!” And all while someone else in the car videotapes the antics on a cell phone for posting later on YouTube or a similar website.

There are more malicious variations, too, where you hurl a whole drink—cup, cover and all—as if it were a cannonball. News reports also cite instances where the jokesters in the car fling liquids they bring with them, like Bloody Mary mix, so it burns the staffer’s eyes.

There’s always that knucklehead who takes delight in harming any victim he can bully. But this not-so-harmless prank seems to be going mainstream. It also appears to be spreading from one region to another, fanned by the internet. A Google search not only turned up ample examples of videos available right now for viewing, but also some favorable discussion of the craze on message boards.

It’s not surprising that law-enforcement authorities in Pittsburgh are warning local drive-thru workers to be on the alert for fire-in-the-hole antics. News reports say the craze has just caught on there, prompting the police to crackdown on the pranksters.

Presumably it’d be easy to identify who they are. When you have a buddy tape your infraction and post it on a website visited by millions of people, chances are high that the authorities could generate a description or that someone might recognize you.

Criminal masterminds they’re not. But plenty of other intelligence-related descriptors come to mind.