Time & Perspective Quote by Neil Cavuto

Cavuto frames a minor inconvenience as a miniature morality play, and the casting is deliberate: the dutiful customer, the negligent teen, the small but telling breach in everyday civility. The specificity of the scene - drive-through, teenage girl, forgotten drinks - grounds it in the most American of settings, where speed and service are basically part of the social contract. When that contract fails, the grievance isn’t really about soda. It’s about status.

The verbs do the heavy lifting. “Reminded” sanitizes his own action, implying patience and reasonableness; “hissed” and “rolled her eyes” animalize and caricature her response, turning a likely messy human moment into a neat symbol of disrespect. “Took her sweet time” adds the insinuation of intentional retaliation, a soft accusation that also performs innocence: he’s not angry, he’s merely observing her petty power move. That rhetorical posture is familiar in cable-news culture, where anecdote is currency and a single bad interaction becomes evidence of a broader decline.

The subtext is generational and class-coded. A “teenage girl” in a service role is an easy stand-in for anxieties about entitlement, work ethic, and changing norms of deference. Cavuto isn’t just reporting behavior; he’s asserting an expectation: service workers should absorb frustration and keep the machine humming. The story’s bite comes from the inversion - the person with the least institutional power gets to withhold courtesy, briefly, and that reversal is what makes the moment feel political rather than merely annoying.