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Comment by TheGRS | Hacker News Reader

I can't help thinking its simultaneously ingenious and hilariously convoluted. Looks like it would be fast to setup, easy to read from the line cook area, and also simple to modify. I'm sure if I was doing the work I could learn the system pretty quickly, but glancing over it as an outsider all I can think about it how ridiculous it sounds that an upright jam packet over a mustard packet means 3 eggs.

And they use what they have, these places always need pickles and jam packets, whereas a real magic marker can dry up and you might forget to order replacement. Fascinating for sure.

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> I can't help thinking its simultaneously ingenious and hilariously convoluted.

It's just ingenious, they're coding the order onto the customer's plate by partially setting it up. They're getting some of the work done, and they don't have to fumble with some separate source of truth.

Still would take a lot of training to get right. Its not intuitive. And I can certainly find a lot of humor in how its implemented.

If you have a system with low turnover of staff then intuitive is not the goal.

The goal is to efficiently transfer information with additional steps in a common language.

A similar example is the hand signals from the old trading exchange floors [1]. The point wasn't for it to be easy to learn. The point was to make it easy to transfer visual information across a very loud and boisterous place. Plus, you had to do it with both people you knew well and people you may never have worked with before.

1 - https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008...

We're talking about Waffle House staff here so I'd be surprised if the turnover was low.

> Still would take a lot of training to get right.

I don't think it would take that much extra training, especially compared to whatever shorthand a waitress or ordering system would have to use.

And it seems like it's something that's possible to get right. All the alternatives I can think of suffer from serious problems this one doesn't (e.g. having to mentally keep track of the correspondence between the order ticket and palate, which invites lots of error).

> Its not intuitive.

It actually seems pretty intuitive. There appears to be a pretty clear correspondence between the code and what it means in most cases.

Also there's nothing to transfer and lose, assuming you don't drop the plate, any built plate just continues until it's complete, no messy papers to move and try to keep associated with what plates. The waiter bringing the order to the table can QA it and pick the right plates.

It's kind of genius.

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