The Electric Chair

As Douglas Adams said, restaurants are complex places. One really does not understand why or how certain things happen there. Even naming conventions in restaurants are confusing. Why is the guy who is serving me called ‘waiter’? I come in the restaurant and wait for someone to notice my arrival. I wait for my soup to come. I wait for my main course to come. I wait for my bill to come. I really don’t understand why I should be doing all the waiting, when there is a designated person (or so it seems) for the job! Alternatively, I should be called waiter and he should be called waitee. I think I’d enjoy my food much better with this anomaly corrected.

Have you ever noticed how your table is cluttered with items which you may not even need? Its all there. You have Tabasco sauce, chilly sauce, soya sauce, vinegar, tomato ketchup, you have salt and pepper, probably a container holding tissue papers, and another holding forks and spoons. But for some reason, they never include a menu. Menus are precious items. Why they are precious, I really haven’t figured out, but I have a couple of theories. One is that maybe there is a band of international criminals using menus to pass along encrypted information, and they really don’t want anyone to have a menu for any longer than strictly necessary lest some non-criminal figures out the cipher. This theory was bullshitted by many of my friends, telling me I was in advanced state of paranoia and a victim of the conspiracy theory. So I came out with another theory: The venture capitalists did not approve the budget for enough menus, and the restaurant owner was constrained to rotate the menus much like playing musical chairs. The over qualified venture capitalists, using queuing theory which states that inter-arrival time follows Poisson distribution and assuming an average waiting time of 5 minutes worked out the number of menus needed, thereby reducing the initial investment, which in turn increased the return on investment, meaning an enhancement of shareholder value.

But seriously, apart from these two theories, I really haven’t figured out why they cannot keep the fucking menu on the fucking table. Why is it that every time you want to order for a new starter, you have to call the waitee (who incidentally will come without the menu and you will have to first ask them to bring the menu. This they will and immediately go off without taking your order.) Seriously, in all the things that anyone would want to flick from a restaurant (that nice painting on the wall, the cute pair of salt n pepper shakers, miscellaneous cutlery etc) the menu comes way down on the list!!

And whats with the waiters.. I mean waitees. I’m sure you’ve come across some specimens who are extremely weird. First there is the ‘know-it-all’ class. They will give you extremely confident advise on what to order and if you end up ordering something else I’ve known of a case where one actually said ‘Arrey, I’m telling you no…’ Then there is the ‘smiley’ class, who always smiles. And its not a polite smile either. It’s a continuous smile, and theres actual mirth in it; not fake. Its more like ‘Sir you’ve forgotten to zip your pants but I don’t know whether I should tell you’ or ‘I know you really need to get laid, I can arrange a prostitute for you’ or worse still ‘Sir I think you are really attractive and I am gay. What say? ;) ’ Everytime he comes to serve you, you put the conversation you are having with others on the table on autopilot and focus all your mental energies on figuring out the rationale behind the smile, but alas to no avail! Thirdly, there’s the ‘stoned’ class. You tell him something and there is such a lack of response on his part that you are compelled to repeat the instructions again, but the effect is the same. You spend the next 15 minutes in trepidation, wondering whether you will be served something quite different from what you had ordered, and in many cases the fear is fully justified.

I’ve now stopped trying to figure out these mysteries. I know it is beyond my capacities to make any sense of this. But then, if the food is good, and the company is cheerful, these idiosyncrasies provide a couple of laughs, and material for a post like this.

# posted by A Chrysanthemum by any other name... : 5:41 AM