Table Seven, Again

May thirtieth. The thing about waitressing is that you can be quite good at it for an entire shift and then, in the final forty minutes, undo a meaningful portion of that goodwill by delivering a burger to the wrong table with such confidence that the person at the table almost accepts it. Almost.

This is not a hypothetical. Table seven ordered the turkey club. I knew this. I wrote it down. The problem is that somewhere between the window and the dining room floor, some part of my brain decided that table four had also ordered the turkey club, possibly because I had walked past table four three times and we had developed a rapport. The gentleman at table four was very gracious about it. He said, quote, 'I mean, I could eat a turkey club.' I retrieved the plate. I brought him his actual order. He tipped fine. I am choosing to see this as a win.

The plate. The decision. The quiet negotiation.

The shift ended at four and I stood at the service counter for a minute doing the math on what had happened. Not the tip math, the sequence-of-events math. The plate had been in my hand. I had read the ticket. I had then walked directly to the wrong table as if on a pre-programmed route. This is the part where I remind myself that I did the letterpress workshop last weekend and made a very precise, very slow, very intentional card, and that apparently all of my precision is now allocated there and the restaurant gets whatever's left.

Mid-pivot. Totally on purpose.

I'm not worried about it. It is a Wednesday in May, the lunch crowd has gone home, and I still have all my tables' water topped off, which I maintain is the actual metric. Gerald was fine when I got home. The collapsed bowl was on the windowsill where I left it. Everything is in its place.