1-800-BIG-MACS

It's up and running. You have to hit 1 a few times to get to the application I designed and built. A smart guy named Wayne built the part that takes the information I get from the caller and looks up the nutrition facts that I read back. And a great guy named Michael has been a top notch project manager.

You can ask for any McDonald's menu item. Some things won't be there - like Shamrock Shakes are out of season, and some things are only in limited markets. But it's pretty neat, I think.

There's also a store locator/phone number lookup application, but that one was pretty ho-hum. Still, you know, if you want to find the nearest McDonald's, now you can. It's tough in places like Los Angeles and Chicago where there are literally hundreds of locations, but it does a pretty good job of it for most locations.

This is, by far, the most widely advertised phone number one of my systems has answered. The number is on every bag, cup, and wrapper.

I'm heading back out to HQ later this month to work on a design for adding speech recognition to the rest of the phone tree.

The weirdest thing to me about their HQ is that from the outside, and from the inside, for the most part, it looks like any other big corporate headquarters on a beautiful campus with lots of lawns and trees...only right in the middle there's a McDonald's in the building. Like you're walking along, cube after cube, and offices and conference rooms and printer stations and a McDonald's and then more cubes and restrooms and offices and... Wait, was that really a whole McDondald's there? It's kind of surreal.