The Spoon

Last week we took some friends out to a new restaurant
and noticed that the waiter who took our order carried a
spoon in his shirt pocket.......it seemed a little strange. When the
busboy brought our water and utensils I noticed that he too had a spoon
in his shirt pocket.
Then I looked around and saw that all the staff had
spoons in their pockets.

When the waiter came back to serve our soup I asked:
"Why the spoon?"
"Well," he explained, "the restaurant's owners hired a
consulting firm to revamp all of our processes. After several months of
analysis they concluded that the spoon was the most frequently
dropped utensil. It represents a drop frequency of
approximately 3 spoons per table per hour. If our
personnel are better prepared, we can reduce the
number of trips back to the kitchen and save 15 man-hours per shift."

As luck would have it, I dropped my spoon after
enjoying my soup, and, yes, he was able to replace it
with his spare. "I'll get another spoon the next time
I go into the kitchen instead of making an extra trip
to get it right now." I was impressed.

I also noticed that there was a string hanging out of
the waiter's fly.
Looking around, I noticed that all the waiters had the
same string hanging from their flies. So, before he walked off, I
asked our waiter:
"Excuse me, but can you tell me why you have that
string right there?"
"Oh, certainly!" Then he lowered his voice. "Not
everyone is so observant. That consulting firm I mentioned also found
out that we could save time in the restroom. By tying
this string to the tip of you know what, we can
pull it out without touching it and eliminate the need
to wash our hands, shortening the time spent in the restroom by 76.39%."

"After you get it out," I inquired, "how do you put it
back?"
"Well," he whispered, "I don't know about the others,
but I use the spoon."