A lot of restaurants these days have call-ahead seating; it’s just like being at the restaurant, except if there’s a line you can plan to be there around the time your name is called, which cuts down on the awkward “let’s sit around while other people eat around us and wait for a table to clear” phase of eating out. Since this call-ahead seating thing is all pretty simple, I was a little surprised when I tried it for the first time tonight:
“Hi, I’d like to put my name in for call-ahead seating?”
“OK, what time would you like to put that in?”
What time? This is an unexpected question. Now would work fine? “Uhh, now I guess?”
“Well, you see sir, the best we can do is, like, put your name at the bottom of the list and we call you when we have free space.”
Thank you, Captain Obvious, of course you can’t just push me to the front of the list.
“… uhh, yeah, right, that’s exactly what I’d like to do. I’d like to put my name on the list. For 2, if that’s possible.”
“Oh, um OK. Bye!”
“Wait, aren’t you going to tell me how long the wait is going to be?”
“The wait? What wait?”
“I mean, normally I tell you my name and how many people, and you tell me about how long I can expect to wait. That’s how this works, right?”
Sure enough, this was the way things were, and the estimate I got cut my wait time down by a few minutes, but I have to ask the obvious question here. Am I wrong in assuming that the entire motivation behind call-ahead seating is to plan your arrival time so that you don’t have to wait? Is there some other idea here that I’m not understanding?
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