The Kitchen Doesn't Have an Undo Button

There’s a regular at Percy’s, the bar two blocks from work where the after-shift table lives, everybody just calls him Walt, and I’ve watched him sit on a lunch special decision like he’s deboning a fish nobody’s paying him to debone. Fifteen minutes into a turn he still hasn’t picked whether to build the third settlement or take the extra card, and the table just sits there, and something comes up in my chest I’ve started calling my AP radar, because it fires the second somebody turns a choice into a seminar.

I used to think it was just impatience. Turns out it’s something else too. It’s that I don’t know how to be in a room where getting it wrong costs nothing.

Six nights a week I make calls that don’t get a redo. Two months back the fryer oil turned mid-rush, I could smell it going before I could prove it, and I had three orders already fired that needed that fryer in the next four minutes. I pulled the whole station, told Renard to 86 anything fried on the board, ate the comps on three tables, and never slowed down to think it over because there wasn’t a version of that decision where thinking it over helped. If the oil was fine I lost forty bucks in comped apps. If it wasn’t and I kept cooking on it I’ve got a sick table and a health inspector’s number in somebody’s hand. You smell it, you call it, you move, and you find out later whether you called it right, standing in the walk-in doing inventory at midnight with nobody left to ask.

Such are the hardships of running a line, I guess. You’re supposed to be constantly talking, guiding people along, reassuring them, giving somebody a talking-to when it’s called for, whether you feel good about the call or not. The ticket rail doesn’t wait around for that. It just fills up.

So then I sit down at a table with cardboard and cubes and watch a grown man take four minutes deciding between two options that get him roughly the same number of points, and something in me gets genuinely irritated before I catch it. Not at him. At the fact that he gets to. Nobody’s tables are getting cold. Nobody’s calling the health department on Walt. He can sit there weighing it like it’s a mortgage and the worst thing that happens is somebody sighs.

And then, worse, I catch myself doing it. Picking a card for a full minute in a game with no clock, running the math on a choice that costs me nothing either way, and I hear this voice, the one that runs the line in my head, going come on, pick something, move. Like I’m 86ing my own hesitation.

I’ve built ten years of not being allowed to hesitate into my body, and it doesn’t know how to shut off just because the stakes dropped to zero and the room went quiet. I don’t think this is really about games. I think it’s about not knowing what to do with a decision that doesn’t demand anything of me. Work trained one muscle so hard the other one atrophied, the one that’s supposed to sit calm with a low-stakes choice and just enjoy having options for once. I haven’t figured out how to build that one back. I just know it now, watching Walt at the table, and watching myself watch him.