WHEN YOU GOT TO GO, YOU GOT TO GO!

October 25, 1994

John Lowry

CEO McDonald’s Corporation

Cross Road Business Center

1 Cross Road Drive, Building A

Bedminster, NJ 07921

Dear Mr. Lowry,

One of my many interests in life is the sport of spelunking, or what we practitioners of the sport simply call: caving. I have been caving since 1975, and since then I have lost count of the many caves I have visited throughout the country. Like mountain climbing, caving requires specialized equipment, skills, and a level of planning proportional to the complexity of the system to be explored.

This past October, I had an experience which I have never had in all my years of caving, and this brings me to the reason why I am writing you this letter, and, as the CEO of what is perhaps the largest fast food chain in the world, no doubt, you are one of the few people walking the planet who can truly appreciate what I am about to tell you, which is a true account of the events which occurred on Saturday, October 8, 1994, somewhere in southern Tennessee in the late afternoon, several hundred feet under the ground.

Cave expeditions can vary anywhere from a couple of hours to several days. Typical sporting cave trips I have been on have run between four and sixteen hours, and by the end of a long trip I have sometimes had to go to the bathroom. I have always been able to hold it till I got out of the cave, though. On a general note, cavers, being more ecologically conscious than average people, are like minded in their desire to keep the entire environment clean, as well as to keep the caves in as pristine a condition as they were before visitation to these delicate ecosystems. In fact, part of our motto says: “leave nothing but footprints.”

But when you got to go, you got to go! And, as traumatic an underground dilemma as this was for me on that day in October, my internal biology held the trump card, and no environmentally sound desire in the world was going to allow me to leave only footprints this time. With escaping gas that could have filled the Hindenburg, perhaps twice, I nervously excused myself from the group and crawled down a two-foot-high stream passage, back to a large room, and with God as my witness, I dropped my pants, positioned my back against a rock with my legs spread wide apart supporting me like a tripod, and proceeded to take the most satisfying dump not only in my nearly twenty years of caving, but perhaps my entire life.

And these were not well behaved mathematical shapes with specific three-dimensional geometric boundaries, like what you might find on urban sidewalks. This was a viscous mess—more like a catastrophe—something between the consistency of axle grease and a milkshake, perhaps a McDonald’s milkshake; but this is not the reason I am writing you. Wait.

Anyway, I didn’t even want to think about how I was going to handle this horrible mess after I finished. I mean, ecology or no ecology, I wasn’t planning on taking it out with me, or anything weird like that. But you see, and this is personal, so I wouldn’t want it to get around, I have hemorrhoids, and due to the irregular shape of the exit nozzle, the extrusion patterns often take on the most bizarre shapes and peculiar squiggly patterns imaginable, and due to the viscous nature to begin with, I faced an interesting challenge for any sludge processing engineer worth his salt. But salt was not the issue here. As I was approaching completion of this satisfying but awful task, I began to look around at the various naturally occurring rocks and mud, which were about the only raw materials I had to work with. After all, this was a cave I was in. Apparently, this was going to cost me dearly, at least psychologically, I thought as I looked at my hand, realizing that something had to be sacrificed, and it wasn’t going to be me. My hand looked back at me in protest, but I shook my head in sorrow, and I think my hand knew it would never be the same after its collision course with destiny.

But then, almost as an afterthought, in defeat, my poor hand instinctively crawled into the breast pocket of my caving jacket, and it removed two mind you, two complete McDonald’s napkins, and they must have been rotting in there for at least a year. These were the two most welcome McDonald’s products I ever saw in my life! I was giddy with excitement, like that reprieve from the governor as the executioner’s hand reaches out to touch the switch.

Well, the battle was not over, because due to the precise nature of the problem, this was still going to present a bit of a challenge even with two entire napkins, and the same level of planning that had gone into this caving expedition would be required to handle the beginning, middle, and end game of my unavoidable detail. On a philosophic note, it is interesting that when resources are so limited, as obviously was the case here, ten percent of the resources go toward ninety percent of the job, and the remaining ninety percent seems to go to the last ten percent. But this is not what I wrote to tell you, even though I, priding myself in my ability to plan in spite of this small subterranean miscalculation, coupled with my above average physical prowess, got the job done, and with almost a half-napkin to spare.

I must confess, and this is the point, that throughout the years I have had less than savory things to say about McDonald’s, not that your company doesn’t produce a competitive cost effective product for the demographically targeted population; it does, and I applaud this achievement in the greatest free marketplace the world has ever known. And while not the culinary focal point of western civilization’s greatest gastronomic creations, I have learned that there is much more to an eating establishment than simply what’s on the menu. The little details are as much a part of the big picture as the main course, so to speak. After all, what goes in must eventually come out, even if it happens to be hundreds of feet under the earth in a cave, almost 900 miles from home. In any event, keep up the good work. No doubt, McDonald’s and I will be seeing more of each other.

  Sincerely yours,

  Steven Martin Cohen

  National Speleological Society # 28,322