Waiter, There's Some Soup In My Lap

I became acquainted with Magnus Pyke during my shortlived career as a waiter. You must all remember the good Pyke, the mad television scientist who was prone to flailing his arms around erratically and with great enthusiasm. 

To be strictly accurate, my first acquaintance with Pyke was not with him as such but with one of his wayward arms. He was the Secretary of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and during one summer break, the association held its annual conference at my university. Which is where the career as a waiter comes into the story, as also does Magnus Pyke's arm.

Had I thought that his arm-waving was anything more than a characteristic with which to give him increased television recognition, I would probably have avoided his table and left the serving duties to some other sucker. Alas, as I was to discover, Pyke's arms windmilled in real life to a similar extent as they did on the telly.

If I tell you that my acquaintance with Magnus Pyke involved his whirling appendages, a tray with a bowl of soup (mercifully not that hot) and a lady with a long blue dress who was next to him, then you can probably guess where this story is heading. Put it this way, the soup did not head in the direction that it should have done and in the manner it should have done: onto the table and still in the bowl.

There was of course a frightful commotion and even greater amounts of arms being waved. It was at this point that Magnus Pyke elevated himself into hero status in my estimation. He took full and total responsibility for the incident, absolved me completely and even went so far as to invite me to some special function (drinks included) at which I made sure I was some distance from him.

Anyway, that's my Magnus Pyke story, and you are probably wondering what it has to do with anything. Well, the anything is the role of the waiter in modern tourism society. Discuss.

Waiters (and waitresses for that matter) come in different guises, be they serving in establishments as diverse as the Brit bar, the pizzeria-grill-international restaurant, the pretentious-cuisine restaurant or the hotel. But regardless of the type of establishment, the waiter is the same. He is a mobile ordering, delivery and recycling system. This is basically all he is. Under the old ASME symbol scheme for depicting processes in a work system, his functions would primarily be denoted by the arrow for transportation: from kitchen to table and back again.

Given this elementary process, why do bars and restaurants bother with humans? Robots could surely do waiters' jobs just as effectively, so long as they weren't of the "Lost In Space" robot variety (a Class M-3 Model B9) and could outdo Magnus Pyke in the arm-waving stakes. "Warning, warning, stupid customer at table eight!"

Attractive as robot waiters might seem, they wouldn't be blessed with especially good interactive communication skills, save for being able to input the order command and then regurgitate it by way of confirmation. "One. Steak. Well. Done. With. Chips. No. Salad." And it is really this, the communication, which distinguishes, or should, the human from the robot waiter, along with certain other characteristics, such as personality. The waiter is, to use business-speak, at the front line of the customer encounter, or customer interface, if you really must. It is why the waiter is, therefore, a crucial part of not only a restaurant's business but the whole tourism experience.

In the Murcian town of Los Alcázares, the town hall has come up with a course for waiters. It is entitled "The waiter: an important tourist agent". The course comprises four modules, one of which is "tourist sensibility", which means something along the lines of understanding the tourist.

You would think, or I would, that working as a waiter in a tourist area, a waiter would have such a sensibility, but this isn't always the case. Far from it. But there are plenty of waiters as well as bar and restaurant owners who do possess this sensibility. For some, it has been acquired through years of experience. For others, and this is surely the key to a good waiter and/or bar owner, it just comes naturally. It shouldn't really require training.

Yet even the good waiter, the one to whom serving, communicating, being pleasant, chatty, interested, helpful and so on all come without a second thought, can be undone by the unexpected. If a tourist with wild, flailing arms comes into the bar, just watch out.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.