BW Boutique Hotel

Archive for June, 2010

The waitress’s response is shaped by various kinds of knowledge of the restaurant: knowledge of the menu, of preparation times, of the layout of the place. Included here is a knowledge of emotional dynamics, both a folk psychology about dining out and the characteristics of particular customers. My mother, twenty years after retirement, can recount the quirks and traits of her regulars. As one veteran waitress puts it: “Everybody has their own personality. That’s another level of learning.., you’ve got to learn this way of working with people.”
The high-level goals and knowledge of the restaurant give rise to more specific action rules—waitressing rules of thumb— that, depending on the context, could aid in sequencing one’s response. All the waitresses I interviewed, for example, mention the importance of attending to—even if just to acknowledge_newly seated customers. (“The big part of this business is not to ignore anybody.”) They also stress the importance of picking up orders— especially hot ones—quiclcjy. Another rule of thumb, applicable during rush hour, is to tally and deliver checks in a timely manner. And yet another is to consider the emotional consequences of action—which calls for an ongoing assessment of character and feeling. Is the cook especially touchy today? Do you have a particularly demanding customer? My mother expresses this emotional calculus when she advises “use your own mind and ask [of yourself] which customer will complain and which won’t.” Given an environment of multiple demands, these rules of thumb could guide one, for example, to attend to a new customer and serve a hot order—and forestall the circuit through the station to refill coffee. Refills would, in the moment, move lower in priority. What is striking, though, is the degree to which the expert waitress relies on a broad strategy that makes many either-or decisions moot. And this brings us to the fourth element in the waitress’s response to multiple demands. She organizes tasks by type or location. She combines tasks in ways that greatly economize movement, that make activity, in my mother’s words, “smooth.” As one waitress puts it, she is always asking “which pieces of what I need to do fit together best.” Though some prioritizing of tasks— guided by rules of thumb—does occur, the more common move (noted as a mark of experience by several of the waitresses) is to quickly see what tasks can be grouped and executed with least effort.
This leads to a fifth characteristic: the way restaurant routines aid in this organizing of tasks. My mother and the other waitresses I interviewed all refer in some way to a circuit through one’s station that is watchful and that takes advantage of the restaurant’s physical layout. As one waitress explains it:
I always think of it as kind of a circle, because there’s the tables, there’s the bar, there’s the coffee station, and it kind of becomes a flow of organizing what can be in one full circle, how many tasks can be accomplished, as opposed to back and forth, back and forth. I think the waitresses who get going back and forth are the
This description resonates with the earlier discussion of attention— the blend of anticipation, vigilance, and motor skill—but in a way
ones who get crazy with four tables. that underscores the dynamic interaction of the waitress’s ability and the structure and conventions of the restaurant.
Perhaps the thing that most impressed me in all this—and it emerged in every interview—is the claim the waitresses made that they work best when the restaurant is busy. On the face of it, this doesn’t make sense. I would imagine that one could remember three or four orders with more accuracy than six or seven, that one could handle refills easier with a half-full station. These numbers. would result in a more relaxed pace but, the waitresses claim, not in more skillful performance. In fact, my mother insists she could never have developed her level of skill in slower restaurants. “You’re not as alert . . . not thinking that quick’; you’re not anticipating orders; “you’re making a couple of trips” rather than a single efficient one. “In a slow place, you think slower.” One waitress notes the feeling of working “like a well-oiled machine” during rush hour. Another says that “when it gets the craziest, that’s when I turn on. I’m even better than when it’s dead.”
Of course, increased volume of trade can lead to disaster as well—if, for example, a waitress calls in sick or a critical piece of equipment fails. Every waitress tells those horror stories. But it seems that, barring the unusual mishap, the busy restaurant can lead to maximum performance. One’s physiology responds—my mother talks about her “adrenaline going faster”—and there is a heightened readiness and reaction. And the increased flow of trade itself provides a variety of demands that call forth, that require the skillful response, the necessary fluid integration of attending, memory, organization of tasks, and strategic use of routine. This is not to deny the exhaustion, even the punishment, of the work, but it is telling how my mother and the other waitresses all comment on the satisfaction that they feel when they perform well under stress. Several use language similar to that of the currently celebrated “flow” experience, felt during those times when a person responds successfully to significant challenges from the environment. “There’s a sense of accomplishment in just the mechanics of it,” says one waitress, “just knowing that. . . I’m handling it all.”

look straight ahead to where you’re going to take your food. You can’t just look completely to the side, carrying all those plates— you could lose your sense of balance. As you’re going out of the kitchen, you more or less take little glances to the side.
This vigilance—from a stationary point or while in motion—is not only a matter of perceptual acuity but also involves working memory and knowledge of the restaurant, knowledge of food preparation and of typical routines. My mother reveals this mix of memory, knowledge, and attention in her monitoring of the status of her customers’ orders: “You’re keeping an eye on who is not served yet. If it’s been too long, you go check on the kitchen yourself.” She recalls who ordered what and when and knows roughly how long a specific item should take to prepare, given the time of day. As she quickly checks her tables, she’s attuned to a possible error in preparation.
Cognitive scientist David LaBerge uses mindfi4lnesS as a synonym for crttetion, and though the dictionary defines mindfulness somewhat sparely as being aware or heedful, the word connotes something more, something that, I think, suits this discussion of waitres sing and attention. Mindfulness, first of all, implies intelligence, a mind knowledgeable and alert. The word also connotes a heightened state and a comprehensivenesS an apprehension of the “big picture,” mentioned earlier, and, as well, a cueing toward particulars and a vigilance for aberration—aS when my mother monitors those delayed orders.
I want to return to that harried moment my mother describes where the regular is tapping his coffee cup, the cook is ringing the bell, and so on. A waitress could attend to all this clatter, and know what it means, and yet not know what to do next. How does she decide what her next move should be?
The answer is a multilayered one and involves some of what
we’ve already seen. First, the waitress’s response will be driven by several interrelated high-level goals: to satisf3i customers (and thus boost income), to maximize efficiency and minimize effort, and to manage conflict. All the waitresses I interviewed referred in some way to this cluster of goals. My mother speaks of “making every move count” and how “you think quick what you have to do first… in order to please people.” Another waitress asks, “How can I maximize my effort in that moment?” Yet another emphasizes the value. of controlling fatigue by “working smart.” These goals will serve to organize the waitress’s activity.

Remembering an array of orders, then, takes place in a rush of activity that demands attention to the environment, organizing and sequencing tasks that emerge in the stream of that activity, and occasional problem solving on the fly. My mother’s interviews contain more than ten references to the pace and conflicting demands of waitressing- She describes a setting where an obnoxious regular is tapping the side of his coffee cup with a spoon while she is taking an order. The cook rings her bell indicating another order is ready, and a few seconds later the manager seats two new parties at two of her tables that have just cleared. And, oh, as she is rushing back to the kitchen, one customer asks to modify an order, another signals for more coffee, and a third requests a new fork to replace one dropped on the floor. “Your mind is going so fast,” she says, “thinking what to do first, where to go first . . . which is the best thing to do … which is the quickest.” She is describing multiple demands on cognition—and the challenge is not a purely cognitive one.
There is a powerful affective component to all this, one with economic consequences. The requests made of the waitress have emotional weight to them. Customers get grumpy dissatisfied if they have to wait too long or if their request is bungled or forgotten. The relationship with the cook is fraught with tension—orders need to be picked up quickly and returns handled diplomatical-1y and the manager is continually urging the movement of customers through a waitress’s station. As my mother puts it, you attend to your orders or “the cook will yell at you”; you try to get customers their checks quickly, “because you’ll get hell from the manager.” The waitress’s assessment of the emotional_blended with the 0omic__con5equels of her decisions and actions plays back into the way she thinks through the demands of the moment.
One more thing. Depending on the restaurant, the flow of work can be facilitated (or impeded) by the arrangements and negotiations, mostly informal, made among the waitresses themselves and among the waitresses and those who bus the tables. These negotiations involve, at the least, the dearing of plates and glassware, assisting each other at rush hour, compensating for absent staff, and transitioning between shifts.
What do we know about the cognitive processes the waitress uses to bring some control to these multiple and conflicting demands? A good place to begin is with the psychological research on attention.
Attention is described in terms of its selectivity, a focusing on particular aspects of the environment; of the sustaining of that selective focus, a concentration as well as a vigilance for similar anticipated events or objects; and of the ability to control and coordinate the focus. In expert performance, these processes may become more refined and automatic. As one researcher puts it, attention serves “the purpose of allowing for and maintaining goal- directed behavior in the face of multiple, competing distractions.”
There are periods in the waitress’s day, lulls in activity, when she can stop and survey her station. My mother talks about a pause, standing back where she can “keep an eye on the register and all the way down the counter.” But often the waitress is attending to things while on the move. Every waitress I interviewed commented on the necessity of attending in transit to requests, empty cups, plates moved to the edge of the table. As one waitress explained: “As you walk, every time you cross the restaurant, you’re never doing just a single task. You’re always looking at the big picture and picking up things along the way.” This calls for a certain combination of motor skill and vigilance, captured in this passage where my mother describes her peripheral attention as she’s deliv

Finally, a customer’s attitude, the way he or she interacts with the waitress, contributes to her recall of the order. My mother comments on “how a customer would say something—you remember this dish is on the second table because so and so acted this way.” She especially notes if “somebody is giving me a rough time.” Of course, a particularly abrasive customer would stick in one’s mind, but this raises an interesting broader issue: the way one’s personal history and social position, the frelings related to these, play into cognition on the job.
One of the things that strikes me about my mother’s report is the number of techniques it contains, the mix of strategies and processes: imagistic, spatial, verbal, and the role of emotion. Such complexity seems necessary when one is hurriedly tending to seven to nine tables, with two to six people at each. As my mother puts it: “Even though you’re very busy, you’re extremely busy
you’re still, in your mind, you have a picture .. . you use all these [strategies], and one thing triggers something else.” The strategies are interactive and complementary, and they enable us to get a sense of how much and what kind of work is going on in the working memory of a waitress during peak hours in a family-style restaurant.