The Life of a Mathematician

Work was interesting today. The computer that is normally used by the person with the drivethrough headset has officially died, which makes doing the drivethrough considerably more challenging. See, it normally works like this: A customer gives their order to whoever has the headset, and that person enters the order into that computer. It simultaneously appears on three other screens: One for the drivethrough window cashier, who is preparing napkins, sporks, and such, another for the people on the food line, who are making the food, and a third for the customer, so they can doublecheck that it is right. When the headset person hits the "Store" button, that order gets sent to the other computer, which is attached to the drivethrough cash register. It then prints a receipt, and brings that order up on its screen when all the orders before it have been paid for and handed out.

Okay, so with the first computer out of commission, it is necessary to ring up the orders on the second computer. This has always been possible, because people sometimes add items to their order after they pull up to the window. If just one person is working over there, there's not much difference. The only time it is not possible to enter items to the new order is when you are taking cash for the one currently at the window. This is the case even when both computers are working, because it's not possible to stand at the window and at the other computer at the same time. One person can do both jobs, although things move a bit slower because almost every customer gets put on hold at least for a few seconds when it's busy.

The trouble is that when you introduce a second person, the computer is still tied up while cash is being taken. So the only way to speed things up is for the order taker (which was me this morning) to write down the orders on paper, so that the cashier can ring them in when the register is free. I got a fresh roll of register tape, and basically produced handwritten receipts for about two hours. These got replaced with printed receipts once the orders were entered into the computer. The system got more efficient once I figured out what order number I should be on and started writing the numbers at the top.

The other difficulty is that until the orders get entered into the computer, they don't appear on any of the screens, and with that computer they never appear on the customer's screen. This meant that I had to keep repeating orders back to the food line people so that they could make the correct items, as well as repeat each order back to the customer since they weren't able to look at it themselves.

It actually was kind of fun to do it this way, if a bit more stressful for everyone. It was hard for me to get all the drinks made since I had to be standing with my back to the dispenser while writing the manual receipts. I was rather pleased when the delivery truck arrived, and I had to give someone else the headset so I could go put everything away.