Maccas - a modern watering hole

Words by Anekeaini Cheok

“What can I get for you today?” McDonalds. Maccas. Mickey D’s. Ex-Honourable Scomo’s favourite public toilet.

No matter what you call it, the essence ultimately remains the same, and the gleaming golden arches are a universal language in their own right.

The notion of an empty McDonald’s seems just about as plausible as walking down Eastern Avenue unapproached during the dreaded election season. The crowd differs throughout the day: from 6am, a smattering of sleep-deprived shift workers doing the breakfast run, while 3pm brings along starved and feral highschoolers. But it’s long after the sun has set that Maccas is most abuzz — when it is most like a watering-hole.

A late-night Maccas feed is an indispensable part of the uni experience, a rite of passage for all: stoned, sober, and everything else in-between. The experience of tapping fervently against the fingerprint-smudged self-serve screens, in synchrony with the person beside you, is just as much a part of the initiation into tertiary education as it is to pull your first all-nighter — a high-school habit you half-heartedly promised to give up.

Too many of my evenings have ended in a drunken stumble to the nearest Maccas — sometimes alone, other times linking arms with an equally intoxicated friend, our heads still pounding with the echoes of bad club music. Momentarily, I’m driven by little more than the most basic of human urges: a thirst, quenched only