BW Boutique Hotel

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.

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