Bork!Bork!Bork! It was not so much Jack in the Box as Bork on the Screen at a US drive-through fast food outlet the other day. Luckily, a Reg reader was there to take it all in.

It was reader Justin Wilson in Santa Rosa, California, who spotted the Jack in the Box drive-through screen, which should be showing whatever the fast food fan enters on the order. Since the fast-food establishment is not known for Linux distributions, and since nobody wants a deep-fried penguin, we can only assume that Wilson witnessed what appears to be Ubuntu coquettishly flashing a desktop rather than confirming the customer's desires.

Unless, of course, you can list those desires in a command line terminal window, and the drive-through operator is actually a secret Linux whizz, who has seen an opportunity to punch a keyboard randomly to do "cyber." We've seen movies – that's how it works, right?

Alternatively, the terminal has been caught with its metaphorical pants down during an ill-timed update, and where there should be confirmation of delicious and nutritious selections, some sort of component installation is happening instead.

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For readers unfamiliar with the chain, Jack in the Box is a US fast-food restaurant chain founded in the early 1950s that primarily serves the West Coast. As well as the chicken sandwich in the picture, it will also supply customers with a variety of burgers and other snacks. Interestingly, in 1981, the chain became embroiled in a scandal involving the contamination of beef shipments with horsemeat and a catastrophic E. coli outbreak in the early 1990s.

Decades on (and the scandals dealt with a long time ago), it is only what looks like Ubuntu having a bad day outside one of the chain's restaurants. The operating system was not even a twinkle in its developer's eye all those years ago, and did not make its debut until 2004. Linux itself was first released in 1991.

According to Jack in the Box's figures, its revenues have declined in recent years. Total revenues decreased 5.8 percent to $349.5 million, compared to $371.1 million in the prior year quarter. Its restaurant count also declined to 2,136 from 2,191.

A "Jack on Track" initiative to get the business focused on its fundamentals has, however, perhaps gone a little too far. After all, showing a command line on a drive-through order screen is probably a little too close to the Linux fundamentals than the franchise operator might like. ®