By MATT RICHTEL

　　SANTA MARIA, California － Like many American teenagers, Julissa Vargas,17, has a minimum-wage job in the fast-food industry － but hers has an unusual geographic reach.

　　 “Would you like your Coke and orange juice medium or large?” Ms. Vargas said into her headset to an unseen woman who was ordering breakfast from her automobile in a drive-through line. She did not neglect the small details － “You Must Ask for Condiments,” a sign next to her computer terminal instruct － and wished the woman a wonderful day.

　　What made the $12.08 transaction remarkable was that the customer was not just outside Ms. Vargas’s workplace here on California’s central coast. She was at a McDonald’s span Ms. Vargas had also taken orders from drive-through windows in Gulfport, Mississippi, and Gillette, Wyoming.

　　Ms. Vargas works not in a restaurant but in a busy call center in this town, about 250 kilometers from Los Angeles. She and as many as 35 others take orders remotely from 40 McDonald’s outlets around the United States. The orders are then sent back to the restaurants by Internet, to be filled a few meters from where they were placed.

　　The people behind this arrangement expect it to save just a few seconds on each other. But that can add up to extra sales over the course of a busy day at the drive-through.

　　While the call-center idea has receives some attention since a scattered sampling of McDonald’s in Pleasant Hill, California, near San Francisco, it meant that her lunch came with a small helping of the surreal. When told that she had just ordered her double cheeseburger and small fries from a call center 400 kilometers away, she said the concept was “bizarre.”

　　And the order-taking is not always seamless. Often customers’ voices are faint, forcing the workers to ask for things to be repeated. During recent rainstorms in Hawaii, it was particularly hard to hear orders from there over the weather noise.

　　Ms. Vargas seems unfazed by her job, even though it involves being subjected to constant electronic scrutiny. Software tracks her productivity and speed, and every so often a red box pops up on her screen to test whether she is paying attention. She is expected to click on it within 1.75 seconds. In the break room, a computer screen lets employees know just how many minutes have elapsed since they left their workstations.

　　McDonald’s says the center in Santa Maria, which is operated by Bronco Communications, is still experimental, but it puts an unusual twist on an idea that is gaining traction: taking advantage of ever-cheaper communications technology, companies are creating centralized staffs of specially trained order-takers, even for situations where old-fashioned physical proximity has been the norm.

　　The goals of such centers are not just to cut labor costs but also to provide more focused customer service by improving the level of personal attention.

　　 “It’s really centralizing the function of not only taking the order but advising the customer on getting more out of the product, which can sell more － at least in theory,” said Joseph Fleischer, chief technical editor for Call Center Magazine, an industry trade publication.

　　Not everyone likes the idea. Denny Lynch, a spokesman for Wendy’s Restaurants, said that the approach had not yet proved itself to be cost-effective. “Speed is incredibly important,” he said, but “we haven’t given this solution any serious thought.”

　　At the Bronco call center, each worker takes up to 95 orders an hour during peak times.

　　Customers pulling up to the drive- through menu are connected to the computer of a call-center employee using Internet calling technology. The first thing the McDonald’s customer hears is a prerecorded greeting in the voice of the employee.

　　When the customer pulls away from the menu to pay for the food and pick it up, it takes around 10 seconds for another car to pull forward. During that time, said Douglas King, chief executive of Bronco Communications, the order-takers can be answering a call from a different McDonald’s where someone has already pulled up.

　　The remote order-takers at Bronco earn the minimum wage ($6.57 an hour in California), do not get health benefits and do not wear uniforms. Ms. Vargas, who recently finished high school, wore jeans and baggy white sweatshirt as she took orders recently.

　　The call-center workers do have some advantages over their on-the-scene counterparts. Ms. Vargas said it was strange to be so far from the actual food. But after work, she said, “I don’t smell like hamburgers.”