Time and motion |
Last week I took some friends out to a restaurant, and
noticed that the waiter who took our order carried a spoon in his shirt pocket. It seemed
a little strange, but I ignored it.
However, when the busboy brought out water and utensils, I noticed he also had a spoon in
his shirt pocket. I then looked around the room and saw that all the servers, busboys,
staff, etc. had spoons in their pockets.
When our server came back to check on our order I asked, "Why the Spoon?"
"Well," he explained, "the restaurant's owners hired Andersen Consulting,
experts in efficiency, in order to revamp all our processes. After several months of
statistical analysis, they concluded that customers drop their spoons 73.84% more often
than any other utensil. This represents a drop frequency of approximately 3 spoons per
table per hour. If our personnel are prepared to deal with that contingency, we can reduce
the number of trips back to the kitchen and save 1.5 man-hours per shift."
As he finished talking, a metallic sound was heard from behind me. Sure enough ... someone
dropped a spoon. Quickly, our server replaced the dropped spoon with the one in his pocket
and said: "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 rather impressed.
Our server continued taking our order and while my guests ordered, I casually looked
around. Suddenly I noticed that there was a very thin string hanging out of the waiter's
fly. I looked around at the other servers and noticed that they all had similar string
hanging from their fly. My curiosity got the better of me and before he walked off, I
asked the waiter:
"Excuse me, but can you tell me why you have that string right there?"
"Oh, certainly!" he answered, lowering his voice. "Not everyone is as
observant as you. That consulting firm I mentioned also found out that we can save time in
the restroom. By tying this string to the tip of you know ...
we can pull it out over the urinal without touching it and that way eliminate the need to
wash our hands, shortening the time spend in the restroom by 76.39 percent."
"Okay, that makes sense, but ... if the string helps you get it out, then how do you
put it back in?"
"Well," he whispered, "I don't know how the others do it, but I use the
spoon.
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