Changes on King Street

I was in Old Town this morning and decided to drive up King Street, something I've not done in a year or two. There were two big changes. The first is that the Old Town McDonalds was boarded up. It's Gone! Coincidentally, I was just talking to Carol about that place last weekend. They were the worst McD's I've ever been in. The staff was terrible. When I was working in Old Town I used to go in there every few months just to see and experience how bad a fast food joint could really get. Lines were long, service was glacially slow, clerks would just walk away from a line and/or stand around doing nothing while customers piled up at the counter. It was just incredible. Now, I know these folks aren't paid or treated well, but neither are a lot of others, (including the guys at all the other McDonalds I've visited over the past 40+ years), but no one has approached the sullen indifference and outright incompetence of Old Town's slack-jawed crew. I never did see a person who was capable of using the register properly. I'd go up and order a Big Mac and the clerk would stare at the pictures on their register keyboard as if they were unearthed cuneiform. Now remember, this is McDonald's, and the Big Mac is like their flagship product, been around for decades, and you know this person gets a hundred orders for it a day; and yet each new request was met with the same sense of wide eyed wonder and confusion. How hard could it be?
At any rate, it's gone. Perhaps they succeeded in driving away all potential customers. More likely, the staff simply forgot to come in to work and McD's HQ figured it had gone bust.
The next big change was at my old high school, T. C. Williams. The old building is still there, but the replacement is going up right next to. Christ! What a great pile of a building! The place is huge. It looked to me to be easily twice the size of the old school. I know nothing of architectural schools and descriptions, but would describe what I saw as neo-Masonic. It's supposed to be done by next Fall, and I look forward to returning there to see the team get beaten in football, (Dismember The Titans!!!).