Fast Food Queries

On one hand, fast food answers a lot of questions. For example,

1. We only have a few minutes; what are we going to get for lunch? Fast food.


2. We only have a few bucks; what are we going to get for lunch? Fast food.


3. We're lazy; what are we going to get for lunch? Fast food.

and on and on.

But fast food also creates a lot of unanswerable questions. For example,

1. What the hell am I eating?
2. Why the hell am I eating this?
3. Why am I so fat?
   

Today, the majority of the boys from the office decided on Wendy's for lunch. I personally would rather eat the ass out of a dead skunk than eat there*, so the actuary and I chose other establishments, but we all brought our meals back to the office to eat together in the conference room for camaraderie's sake. Anyway, on one of the Wendy's bags was printed the following:

"We figured out that there are 256 ways to personalize a Wendy's hamburger. Luckily someone was paying attention in math class."

The claim was accentuated with a little xy symbol thingie from calculus for effect. Well, that got us talking about the number of possible toppings and combinations, and before you know it, the actuary took to the dry erase board with calculations to see if he could come up with this number.

He couldn't.

And he's a smarty pants. I'm a person who still counts on my fingers, and let me tell you something, it was fascinating to watch him. A regular Einstein, this guy. A Good Will Hunting if you will. His elbow was flying about, multiplying things and carrying shit over, and some of the numbers ended in exclamation points, like they were shouting at each other, the whole thing was freakin' nuts.

Also on the back of the bag was a number: 1-800-88-WENDYs, which encourages people to call in about their Wendy's dining experience. We figured we'd get 'em on speaker phone and get this mess straightened out. How many toppings is Wendy's in-house actuary using to come up with this number? Inquiring minds (and our in-house actuary) want to know. C'est challenge! We need answers, or I'm going public on this forum with their crock-of-shit theorem. I mentioned to my office boys here about the power of blogging, particularly the power of fast food blogging: Liz at Taco Bell Love wound up with some Taco Bell Bucks simply by thinking/eating/writing outside the bun.

The upshot of the call was, Wendy doesn't know how she came up with that statement. I was transferred here and there a few times throughout the Wendy's Corporate phone tree, and at the end, someone said they'd look into it and call me back.

We'll see.

In the meantime, if there are any other math nerds out there who miss Math Team and want to get in on this action, go for it. Put your e=MC squared in the comments. Get your factorials on. Remember to show your work.

*sober (I would eat a Frostie sober, however)