BW Boutique Hotel

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

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