I saw a waitress trying to do her job.

Context
I'm still at the SIRSI Superconference. For the second day running, I went to the hotel buffet for breakfast. It was much busier today than yesterday, and unlike yesterday, I didn't ask for anything special to drink. Today when I completed my meal I had to flag someone down and ask her how to get a check because unlike yesterday, I didn't know who my waitress was. The woman who eventually brought my bill was very apologetic.

Commentary
Two blog entries in two days! Conferences are inspirational!

You may think this is going to be another rant about poor customer service, but it's not. It's going to be about something else near and dear to my heart: hog-tying professionals.

I like breakfast buffets, but I think if I was professional waitress they would bug me. First of all, any time you work in concert with self-service you get tipped less ("I did all the work. Why should I tip her?"). But I also think it would get in the way of doing my job. Consider: a good waitress has a routine for getting all her tasks done quickly and efficiently (e.g. get drink orders, bring drinks, get food orders, bring food, check progress of meal, bring check, pick up check, bus table, done). She probably also has an internal clock that tells her approximately how long each of these tasks takes. As customers, part of what we consider good service is that each stage of our meal is neither rushed nor unduly delayed.

Now change the scenario to how a buffet works: the waitress only does some of her tasks and the rest are taken over by people who a) don't really know what they're doing and b) don't follow her standard rhythm at all. And yet she's still expected to know where they are in the routine so she can respond when she is needed. The structures that have been put in place to make the procedure easier for laypeople make it more difficult for her. But we still don't tip her!

As a librarian, I see this situation play out when it comes to information seeking. I have training on how to make databases give up their secrets. I won't bore you with the details. But these days the expectation is that everyone should be able to find their own information. Since most people aren't trained in how to do that, interfaces become more forgiving of vagueness and mistakes. Perhaps this means that most of the time when you search for something on the Internet, no matter how little you know about what you're doing, you find something useful somewhere in the results you're offered.

But often when I do an online search, I have to take extra effort to weed out results that don't really fit my query because the program thought I might have made a mistake formulating it. What makes life easier for you makes it harder for me. As a result, my hard-won skills become devalued because "anyone can find adequate stuff on the Internet." Possibly, but if the user-friendly software would get out of my way, I'd find better stuff faster. I'm a professional, after all.

What did you see today?