Well here it is, my very first blog post for Philosophy 102. Over the next few months I’ll be interpreting philosophical thoughts and relating them to my experience and passion for the food industry. Rooted deep within me is a fervent enthusiasm for restaurants and the subculture that exists for those that work in the field. Today I will link the concepts of synchronized chaos and small world networks to a routine Sunday at the restaurant I work at.
The material we read provides us with a rich compilation of information on the topic of synchronized chaos. Ranging from historical background to modern-day examples, it is chock full of good stuff. However is order to connect the restaurant with synchronized chaos I’ll focus on a specific notion of synchronized chaos, the butterfly effect. The butterfly effect presents the notion that little things or events can make a big difference in the course of life. A common example suggests the flap of a butterfly’s wings can set off a tsunami thousands of miles away. But can that concept be applied on a smaller scale to a restaurant? Let’s take a look.
Every Sunday my restaurant churns out hundreds upon hundreds of cups of soup for our customers. Specializing in homemade organic soups, it’s the backbone of our company. A very detailed and technical system is put in place to ensure that from the time a customer places the order until the time it arrives on their table, nothing goes wrong. But what if something does go wrong? How does once little incident affect the entire flow of the establishment?
In order to test the concept of synchronized chaos I decided to take matters into my own hands. In the grand scheme of things one table of patrons may not seem like a big deal. Like I said, we serve hundreds of people a day so how could one table affect the entire order? It’s important to note that the butterfly effect doesn’t necessarily suggest that the wings cause the waves that deliver the tsunami but impacts a series of events that lead to chaos. That is exactly what happened this Sunday. Once the soup is scooped and prepared a runner is expected to hurriedly “run” the order to a table. The tables of course being numbered by section and table number. For example, a cup of sweet potato bisque with shrimp and crab must be run to table 13 outside. In under a minute the “runner” has the soup on the table and business continues to flow as normal. In this situation however I purposely delivered a bowl of soup to the wrong table in hopes of watching chaos ensue.
Now it’s important to note that I’m not some sort of sinister employee with a sick amusement of starting chaos at my place of employment. On the contrary I love my job and strive to provide the highest level of customer service to anyone that enters. But this was purely science, purely for research, and in the name of academia so at least I had that scape goat.
"I love my job!" - Random Waitress
In the beginning the chaos was relatively minimal. The customer simply told me that was not the soup they had ordered. Apologizing, I hurriedly returned to the kitchen and delivered him the correct soup. What I didn’t see was that the mis-run had caused other soup to be run to the wrong table and send a sense of confusion throughout the kitchen. This in turn caused more plates to be run to the wrong table in attempts to get the orders right. Quickly things started to spiral out of control and before long there was chaos in the kitchen. Blame was being pointed, runners were confused, and servers were growing increasingly frustrated. It seemed that alas, my experiment had worked. One small occurance with one item out of thousands had caused full level chaos within the restaurant. The butterfly effect, at least in this case, holds true.
**Note: I quickly restored the restaurant to a peaceful flow and compensated the appropriate customers for their discomfort.**
