Like Florida, Australia does a lot of things that leave us scratching our heads and wondering if everything is going OK down there. From the avocado latte to the grass-covered restaurant table to the fish-and-chip shop called “the Battered Wife”—plus, that lady who spent two whole months putting needles into fruit, the land Down Under often elicits the same response: u wot, m8???
To be fair, Americans do plenty of our own crazy shit, like the man who allegedly shot through a Taco Bell drive-thru when he didn’t get enough sauce packets. But the most recent example of extreme, unwarranted, fast food-related overreaction does, in fact, come from Warrawong, Australia, where a man named Ryan Sharp has been accused of blowing up a car after an altercation in the drive-thru at McDonald’s.
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What went down at McDonald’s isn’t totally clear. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that, according to police, Sharp’s partner was “hooted at” in a McDonald’s parking lot in late February, while Sky News claimed that she’d been “honked at” in the drive-thru. By both reports, though, the McDonald’s dispute sounds fairly minor. In any case, she followed the car and got the plate number.
Sharp and his partner’s response, however, was not minor. According to the Herald, police alleged that the couple have spent the past six weeks harassing the other driver, and that they went from online death threats to an IRL attack. Sharp is accused of putting a “sophisticated” explosive under the other driver’s car. The other driver, it seems, was not harmed, but the police claimed that the bomb blew up in a way that could have injured or killed the car’s occupants.
The couple was arrested earlier this week. Sharp went to court yesterday on several charges including “two counts of using a carriage service to threaten serious harm.” His partner was charged with stalking and being an accessory to his crimes, but she has since been released on bail.
Just another reminder that honking at the car in front of you at the drive-thru isn’t going to lead to anything good, and it won’t get you your Egg McMuffin any faster, anyway.
