Waiters and Your Messy Inbox
Did you wake up this morning looking like slow roast lamb with fries and salad (hold the dressing)?
Because that’s how waitress Jessica Baker sees you.
To remember a customer’s order, Jessica says she imagines the customer’s face as the food they ordered.
“I look directly at each person as they tell me their order and often repeat it in my head a few times as they say it, especially if it has a lot of special pieces (ie no tomato, sautéed onions, and sauce on the side). I tell myself that this woman looks like the food she wants. Or maybe it would be better to say when I look at her I see the food she ordered? It’s difficult to explain.” She told Quora online magazine.
Her ability to memorise orders is dubbed “The Tortoni Effect” after a study conducted at Café Tortoni in Buenos Aires, apparently the city known for wait staff with exceptional order-taking memories. Who knew?
The study published in Behavioural Neurology looked at how waiters could take and deliver drink orders for as many as 10 people per table without writing anything down — and without asking or checking with the customers about who ordered what.
All nine waiters in the study carefully observed at least customers’ faces and clothing - and then took off for the kitchen pronto.
They told the researchers they “did not pay attention to any customer after taking a table’s order, as if they were protecting the memory formation in the path from the table to the bartender or kitchen.”
Almost 100% of the orders were delivered correctly (if the patrons stay seated in the same seats).
But what is even more extraordinary is that moments afterwards, both Jessica and these Café Tortoni waiters probably would have forgotten every order.
In a famous 1927 study for the University of Berlin, psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik observed that restaurant waiters seemed to remember a complex order just so long as the order was in the process of being prepared and served, but not after it was finished.
The Zeigarnik’s study and a follow up by John Tierney and Roy Baumeister (Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength) shows that our mind holds information until we complete a task or make concrete plans related to the task.
And that is why our minds feel cluttered. Every single uncompleted task, whether buying dog worming tablets to completing a tender document, sits in our brain as an incomplete “order.”
New York Times bestselling author of Getting Things Done David Allen is a world expert on this.
“You can fool everyone else, but you can’t fool your own mind,” he writes.
“Even if you have already decided on the next step you’ll take to resolve a problem, your mind can’t let go until and unless you park a reminder in a place it KNOWS you will, without fail, look.
“It will keep pressuring you about that untaken next step, usually when you can’t do anything about it, which will just add to your stress,” he concludes.
And then you really will look like chopped liver.
See clips from his 2018 Australia tour here: https://www.thegrowthfaculty.com/onDemand/
Sources/further reading
https://www.psychologistworld.com/memory/zeigarnik-effect-interruptions-memory
https://gettingthingsdone.com/
'Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength' by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney (ISBN 0143122231)