Extra dimensions of service
Since they move freely in time, one moment is as good as the next to them
I’m sure you’ve suffered the same experience. You’re at a restaurant, the food you’ve ordered has arrived and you tuck in. Thirty seconds later, a waiter will come across and obsequiously ask if everything is alright. Since there hasn’t been the time for anything to go wrong, you nod politely and thank them. They then disappear and leave you to eat the rest of your meal in peace. But they remain absent even once you’ve finished and are, in a moment of weakness, contemplating dessert. They will have been gone so long by the time you ask for the bill, you wonder if they ever existed in the first place. When you are still waiting at the end of the evening when they are wiping down the tables, you convince yourself that everyone, not only the waiter, has completely forgotten about you.
As I begin the long walk home (I may have been waiting so long the Tube stopped running) the question plagues me. Why, wherever I go, do the waiters ask if I’m alright at the start and abandon me for the rest of the meal? I believe I may now have the answer – restaurant waiters exist in the fifth dimension.
Mortal folk like you and me exist in three dimensions of space, in which we move freely, and one dimension of time, in which we’re limited in a linear fashion. I’m not quite sure why I’m explaining dimensional physics to Imperial students. I’m going to get so much hate-mail for this – or worse, corrections. Waiters have another dimension to call their own, meaning they are no longer limited to one second per second time-travel as we are – they can move as freely as we move through the first dimension of space.
Restaurants’ management mandate that waiters check on their customers in case something is wrong. Training for what to do in such an unlikely situation is only provided for senior staff but the important thing is that they check. Unfortunately, the waiters don’t think of us, those handicapped to four dimensions. Since they move freely in time, one moment is as good as the next to them. So they check with us at the start, to make sure they do it, and then consider their duty discharged. Since they can come to the table at any moment and we respond that everything’s fine, they assume that everything is fine in every moment. With such blissful ignorance, they don’t think to check again and I am left waiting at the end of the night with a dust-sheet over my head.
Though I’ve solved this conundrum, more questions still remain. Are waiters naturally five-dimensional, or do they grow into it? Is there an aptitude test? Conversely, do five-dimensional people naturally orientate towards waiting tables? What do they do when they’re not checking on my table? Does it involve wrangling dinosaurs? I’ll get back to you on this one.
…or maybe I already did.
