Last week, we took some friends to a new restaurant, and noticed the waiter taking our order carried a spoon in his shirt pocket. It seemed a little strange. When the busboy brought our water and utensils, I observed he also had a spoon in his shirt pocket. Then I looked around and saw all the staff had spoons in their pockets. When the waiter came back to serve our soup I inquired, ‘Why the spoon?’
‘Well,’ he explained, ‘the restaurant’s owner hired a consulting firm to revamp all of our processes. After several months of analysis, they concluded the spoon was the most frequently dropped utensil. It represents a drop frequency of approximately 2 spoons per table per hour. If our personnel are better prepared, we can reduce the number of trips back to the kitchen and save 5 man-hours per shift.’
As luck would have it, I dropped my spoon and he replaced it with his spare. ‘I’ll get another spoon next time I go to the kitchen instead of making an extra trip to get it right now.’
I was impressed.
I also noticed there was a string hanging out of the waiter’s fly.
Looking around, I noticed all of the waiters had the same string hanging from their flies. So, before he walked off, I asked, ‘Excuse me, but can you tell me why you have string right there?’
‘Oh, certainly!’ Then he lowered his voice. ‘Not everyone is so observant. That consulting firm I mentioned also learned we can save time in the restroom. By tying this string to the tip of our you-know-what, we can pull it out without touching it and eliminate the need to wash our hands, shortening the time spent in the restroom by 56.39%.’
I asked quietly, ‘After you get it out, how do you put it back?’
‘Well,’ he whispered, ‘I don’t know about the others, but I use the spoon.’
Join the Discussion
Type out your comment here:
You must be logged in to post a comment.