My partner and I were recently eating at an Olive Garden. On each table at Olive Garden there are these Ziosk tablets that you can use to call your waiter, order drinks, or close out your bill with a card.

Our server was a bit irritable and disengaged, and food was taking a loooooooong time to come out. We noticed that tables that were seated after us were being served. It wasn't a big deal -- we weren't in a hurry and were doing fine talking and sipping our drinks. I used to work in restaurants for years so I tend to empathize a little with underpaid, overworked, and now evidently hyper-surveilled waiters and waitresses, so her demeanor didn't really bug me.

Anyway after close to an hour I said to my partner "yikes... Food is super late and the service really left something to be desired huh?"

Perhaps a minute later, a non-uniformed, well-dressed managerial looking fellow tapped my shoulder, and said "I am so, so sorry for the experience that you had here tonight. Your food will be out in just a few minutes."

Shortly thereafter, the waitress arrived, looking flustered, and said "Your food is on its way out guys -- is there anything else I can get for you? Your drinks are on the house tonight".

Our food came, and the rest of the night her demeanor was entirely different: she was hyper-attentive, warm, and apologetic.

I read later that the Ziosk tablets are equipped with microphones and cameras. I could find one article about the tablets mentioning the microphones and cameras [0], but it seems unclear as to whether or not restaurants use them to surveil patrons -- both Ziosk and the restaurants themselves deny doing so.

I'm aware that our experience was probably purely a fluke and completely explainable by my comments by chance coinciding with someone in the kitchen finally noticing our ticket, but the whole experience really irked me regardless.

Probably because it's technically feasible -- the tablets are literally equipped with microphones, cameras, and possibly other sensors and are already speaking with remote servers to handle payments and ordering -- and probably also because this sort of thing is already happening at scale in other physical and digital spaces we inhabit, where pointy haired types mindlessly seek opportunities to gather data allegedly in the name of optimizing process and driving basket sizes.

[0]https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2014/11/18/call-kurtis-inves...