Dear Feastlings,
Every few days, something new pops up in my inbox or my newsfeed about a robot that will clear tables or run food, or one that will flip burgers or wash dishes, and now and again there’s someone telling me that artificial intelligence will help with the wine list or the ordering, and I must say: this week, I’d love to get a robot.
People are great in a number of respects, but after a week of dealing with both staff and guests who’ve been all too human, I’m ready for a restaurant that’s staffed by robots, who’ll wait on robots, and I’ll hide safely in the back of my bedroom closet. The sensitivity and misinterpretation that comes with human coworkers, and the occasional entitlement and hostility, and the even rarer dine-and-dash that comes with human guests, would be banished from my daily routine. In my special world where robots wait on robots, ordering items for yet more robots to make and send out via even more robots than that, there’s no misinterpretation, there’s no hostility or bluster, and the people in the equation, myself included, are happy to serve our robot overlords.
The robots don’t inflict their own personal desires on every other robot in the dining room, nor on every other robot in the kitchen, and even if they did, everyone else would be a robot, so they wouldn’t take it personally.
Robots would be as indifferent to my shortcomings as they would to my talents, and they wouldn’t, as staff or guests, part ways both hurt and hurtfully. I don’t want to rattle any cages more than mine’s been rattled this week, so I won’t go into the daily drama that is human interaction, but I will go out and buy a roomba, perhaps, or let some other automaton into my life where I previously hadn’t had it.
For now, though, it’s humans- the human who didn’t feel properly greeted at the door, the human who left the kitchen without notice, and all the humans who’ve mercifully remained. And in the coming weeks, this ragtag bunch of humans will be putting out a wine tasting,
a benefit dinner,
Benefit dinner for the Rogue Theatre: If on a winter’s night a traveler
a wine dinner,
and Thanksgiving dinners to pick up the night before Thanksgiving, which I’m not posting just yet, but you’ll see it here soon.
Thanks, kind friends, for being the sort of humans that keep me from wanting to consort exclusively with robots, and for lifting our spirits each day. We’ll see you soon, I hope.
Yours,
Doug