Piezo Waiters

One of the cafés I really like recently started using those li’l “beepers”. Customers get one when ordering their food and when they start beeping you’re supposed to bring it to the disk and pick up your plate yourself.

So far so good. I’m all for it if it makes the job of the wait staff easier. I’m not blaming the café for what I’m about to rant about below:

I blame the manufacturers of the beepers for having such an incredibly annoying and never-ending piezo beep. I do think piezo beeping is useful tech and not every instance needs to be replaced by an actual speaker and sound chip, but, the ambiance used to be the main draw of this particular place! If they had put in like birdsong or something, that’d‘ve been perfectly charming.

Instead what used to be a serene place with mismatched old-style furniture and quaint paintings and nostalgic breakbeats on the speakers is now home to an incessant beep-beep-beeping.

With this particular style of beeper there’s a button on the side that turns it off so customer’s can turn them off right away and carry the now-silent beeper to the disk and pick up their plate.

Even that would’ve been plenty annoying: this particular chirp is just that bad.

But that wasn’t what was happening. Instead, customers would bring the still-beeping li’l device to the unmanned desk, grab their plate, and leave the device there to beep. The people who worked there weren’t able to turn it off either.

What I’ve seen in other places is that the beep is a li’l bassier and more melodic, augmented by vibrations and a dull, flashing red light, and then the staff receives the beeper and turns it off right away. Here, that silecing responsibility was on the customers and no-one did. I don’t blame them either becuase I wouldn’t‘ve figured it out unless I had seen the chef come out from the kitchen to turn one off. I mean, it was beeping when I entered the café and it kept beeping through the entirety of me standing in line, and only after five minutes or so a chef, that seemed super busy and overworked, could come out and turn it off, so I made sure to take note of what button he pressed to do so, in order to be able to turn of mine once my own order was done half an hour later.

And, on my way out I turned off another abandoned and annoying li’l one of these, left by some customers who had picked up their food and walked away.

The people worked there seemed miserable and unhappy but the kind of miserable and unhappy where you can’t put your finger on it because you’re so numb to the pain that you forget what caused it but not numb enough to the pain to know what to do about it.

Conclulu: I’m gonna try to find a different place. This was stressful and miserablse.