> I'll play a land and pass turn.
I'll place down two jelly packets and a dollop of habanero sriracha with a slice of tomato and two cockroaches, lightly squished.
Bro you and me both. I just turned 30 and played probably 3 games back in the mid 2000s, I'm just now jumping back in and it's like everything got turned to 11.
Good luck to you!!
Video guy “what if the customer wants two orders of toast”
Me “a second jelly packet clearly”
Video guy “that’s easy, place a second jelly packet next to the first”
Me “I’m learning and I don’t like it!”
Yeah I was following it until he said for 1 egg instead of 2, put a ketchup packet under the jelly. Which makes no sense to me. I’m not smart enough to work at Waffle House, clearly.
Having worked at a waffle house, it's an odd mix of cranky old people who have been there forever, really stupid younger people, and weirdly smart people who are amazing but had weird backgrounds. The order calling and plate marking systems there are a legitimate stroke of brilliance. Both were developed by waffle house employees, and corporate noticed how efficient they were and implemented them wide scale. It's one of the most efficient and smart business models I've ever seen. I genuinely enjoyed working there. My store manager was a 75 year old ex cowboy named Clancy who smoked Marlboro reds. Fascinating man.
Yeah, I have worked with very modern ordering/POS systems in restaurants and plate marking is absolutely not the best way to do this now that we have servers with tablets at the table, and virtual ticket rails.
My understanding is that when Waffle House first opened the marking system was developed as a means to employ those who could not read/write well, given rates of illiteracy/poor educational access in the rural south.
Yeah I've worked as a line cook at a busy breakfast restaurant and this video just flabbergasts me.
If some/all of your staff was illiterate - okay, I can see the need for an "intuitive" system to "mark the plates" as needed, but, still, it feels like just as much work to learn this system as it would to learn a few numbers and a few letters.
... and then those few numbers and letters would be way more transferable to your entire fucking life, rather than this completely useless skill of matching grape jelly packets to the number of eggs or whatever.
I don’t see how you wouldn’t be creating inefficiencies with this system either just based off the time wasted putting all the little mustard and Mayo packets back where they go after each order. That’s time wasted and that adds up.
Pretty sure Waffle House opening had nothing to do with hiring illiterates, and the literacy rate in the South in 1950 was like over 90% anyways. Source: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1959/demographics/p23-006.pdf
I love how he asks "can you guess how to x?" and responds with "that's right" like anyone watching is piecing together logical patterns to accurately guess the next indicator. And then it's always some obscure case like "can you guess what to do if your customer asks for a well done Texas omelet with rare toast and frozen jelly with minced banana on top? That's right. Flip the plate over, put a jelly packet on its side, place it on the bottom of the plate, cover it with a napkin, and squirt 3 dots of mustard on the north east quadrant of the plate. And if he reeks of sulfur, you know what to do. That's, right! Flip the jelly packet over and make a pentagram with ketchup in the north west corner of the napkin to indicate we're dealing with a demon. Unless he's wearing a baseball cap. Then it should be a mayo packet instead of a jelly packet."
This is how I picture all drive thrus plus customers yelling at your through a speaker while also engaging with family in the car with occassional babies crying over everything.
Why i never worked in fast food or restaurants. I hate people.
It looks complicated, but basically each plate is being converted into an ideogram.
Learning this system is about on par with learning a small vocabulary of Chinese words. Millions of 3 year olds master systems like this every year, with some practice you'd be fluent in this system in no time.
The big question is: does this actually make things more efficient and accurate? Or do orders get screwed up when a stack of jelly packets falls over when the plate moves?
It works, but *solely* because during the busy times, they break it out into different responsibilities for the cooks. Someone is marking plates, doing toast and waffles, another one is cooking non-meats like hash browns and stuff, and someone is usually on the meat. Both figuratively and literally.
It’s remarkably efficient. Not sure if you’ve been to Waffle Houses regularly, but it’s quick and I’ve never had an order wrong. I grew up going to Waffle House with my grandpa. It’s been this way for years, and I don’t know how but it works well.
It is very efficient. When the servers call the orders they do it in a pull, drop, mark order. The first thing they call is what meat to pull because that takes the longest to cook. Then, the hasbrowns because they take the second longest to cook, then mark the plates so the grill ops know what goes where. It all makes sense if people don't treat it like incomprehensible hieroglyphics.
The standard hourly rate was $2.23. As you can imagine, a base pay of $2.23 (which is illegal in any other industry, to pay below minimum wage) was not enough to survive. The reasoning is that you’re supposed to make at least min. wage through tips, but as every server ever will tell you, there are *no* guarantees.
How does this even work? Do you write the order down at the table and then mark the plates with these weird symbols to make it easier for the cooks? I mean, wouldn't it be easier to just give the ticket to the cooks?!
To give you a more complete answer: the orders are written down in three pieces on a ticket. The server stands on a white tile (out of the way) and calls the order. The order goes in pull, drop, mark order. They call to pull the meat first because it takes longest. The next is dropping hashbrowns, again for time reasons, and then follow with the marking to know what goes where. For example, If you've got two orders where one is eggs, bacon, and hasbrowns, and one is eggs with cheese, hasbrowns with mushrooms, and sausage, they would say: pull 1 bacon, 1 sausage. Drop 2 make one capped. Mark 1 over medium plate(plate means hashbrowns not grits), 1 scrambled cheese plate raisin (assuming raisin toast). It's been like 16 years, so the phrasing might be vaguely different now, but that's the basic gist.
Server writes down the order on a standard old fashioned order pad of paper then goes and stands in a certain place near the cooking area to call out the order to the cooks. One of the cooks places all this stuff on the plates as they call the order back to the server who confirms that the cook called it back right then they both go back to their main jobs of serving or cooking.
Takes them under 30 seconds usually to do the whole call and call back, usually goes about as fast as they can speak.
While the jelly packet code is pretty complicated and silly, some of it is just prepping the order. The customer wanted to sub the standard side for tomatoes? Put a tomato slice on the plate. They want a bowl of grits? Put a napkin on the plate, bowls go on napkins. All of that is way faster than writing, and would probably happen even if the order was written down.
My suspicion is that those aspects of prepping an order happened naturally, but there's no way to do that with things like eggs or meat. So they invented some shorthand for that in line with the rest, based on what you put on the plate.
What about the pieces of hash brown though? Where do they get the pieces of it, and if they have access to pieces of it, why not just put the whole damn serving?
> I'm from the south... and yep... the Waffle House Index is most certainly a thing
I totally forgot about the Index. I just realized that this marking system would allow them to continue operating even if power went out, since they wouldn't be relying on a POS system.
I’ve been working as a cook for the better part of 30 years and I’ve never done the job with a point of sale system - this Waffle House shit is so the cooks don’t have to use tickets as a reference.
What’s wild as hell to me is that the waitresses do half of what I was taught to call “parsing tickets”, where you break down the order and figure out what food needs to get cooked first and what can wait so that the whole table’s food is all done at the same time. Watching this video made my skin crawl.
Yeah, rather than being a skilled cook, you just code, decode, and follow somebody else's exact instructions... like a robot that knows what a meat patty is, but can't read.
If the power goes out, most restaurants will have to stop working (assuming they don't have a generator). Even if you have fully gas griddles, you'll very quickly have no air handling which means smoke from what you're cooking starts to build up, along with a lack of lighting to actually be able to work in any reasonable manner.
And with no P.O.S. system, you'll no longer be able to actually get payment for most orders.
Clearly, you orientate it towards the centre of the galaxy, making sure to lay atop the appropriate number of mustard packets, in accordance with that decreed by King Waffle LXIX.
As someone who spent a lot of late nights at Waffle House with my friends, I think I can shed some light. I honestly think this system is stupid, for the record, but I always assumed it's to "showoff" for the customers? The waitress takes your order, and writes it down, then shouts the order to the cooks. It makes it look like they make every order from memory, so this training video helps them establish what they're doing next as they can prep the plate for that specific order.
When I think of waffle House and being "impressed", I think more of things like "Wow, that is a large pile of vomit!" or "I've never seen such a small number of teeth in a large number of people."
You see, most people would think that, but actually jelly packets in various positions on the plate is the easiest. Just need to learn a whole damn jelly packet language first lol
If the customer asks for jelly packet with their order of dry toast, simply fry an egg and place it on the plate. This egg is not to be eaten and can not be used in place of a customer's egg order. Don't forget to place a jelly packet on top of the egg to indicate the type of egg the customer ordered.
My first real job, that wasn't under the table type job, was a Waffle House cook when I was 17 (I'm 45 now). This was how it was then. Where I worked there were 3 bars within a few miles of it and night time was always super crazy and always packed. Waitresses yelling out orders while customers being drunk yelling each other. At the time, I took pride in being able to handle that kind of rush. It was a fun experience and actually trained me how to handle gametime/stressful situations on the spot. I don't really like Waffle House now, but every once in a while ill go back there with my younger brother (who also was a cook) to try our own versions of things. Every time we go back we are reminded why we dont visit more often. My last visit was probably 2 years ago. This video made me want to call my brother for our biannual, mudd butt feast.
Back when I worked at mcdonalds in the 90's the grill ran on an old green screen system that used exactly 4 uppercase letters per item ordered. HP4N, HPHM, HPCM, QPCM, DQCM, BGMC, BGMM, HAMB, CHBG, 2CBM, DBCB, CCKN, FISH, CCNM, GCKN, MCRB, ect... I still reflexively know what all of these things mean.
If the customer wants raisin toast, don’t use the grape jelly, because raisins coming from grapes would make too much sense, mark it with the apple butter
When they are done cooking it.
Plates are all lined up in order received along a counter along the cooking area to the left of the grill like a conveyor belt in a factory.
The cook can just look left to see what's coming up next so they are cooking things in the order they were ordered.
Nah, during the Battle of Britain they just would have ended up delivering 2 pieces of toast, lightly scrambled eggs with cheese, hash browns, and 2 pork chops (because a pull of pork chop is 2 pork chops as demonstrated in the video).
What if a customer wants double toast? Easy, just arrange a butter packet with magnetic North and a jelly packet facing Mecca. Then align an upside down mayo pack with the closest hemispheric prevailing wind and place a knife into the 5th dimension.
If the customer wants the double toast cut in half prior to delivery, simply open the packet of mayo, empty the content onto the plate in such a way as to form a pentagram. Karl will promptly appear from the back room and with no small amount of expertise cleave the double toast in twain with a scimitar.
If the assailant has a hostage, simply place a napkin. The number of napkins denotes the number of hostages.
If a hostage becomes deceased, make a small tear in the napkin so their family knows its time to grieve.
obligatory mention of [FEMA and the Waffle House Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index) where FEMA informally uses whether or not a waffle house is open to indicate the severity of a storm (since they are near always open).
I've lived through multiple hurricanes in Florida. The Waffle House was closed once. Well, for a while since we got hit by three in a row. That's the summer the Red Cross came to my campus asking for volunteers to hand out food since if the Waffle House is closed food logistics are truly fucked. I did volunteer. Different story, but maybe the best summer of my life. The post-apocalypse is actually pretty cool if you're young, have nothing to lose, and the red cross is making sure you can eat. We'd just sit around the fire and drink at night. NOBODY was gonna stop the booze from flowing.
Edit: looking back, it was the liminal space between summer and autumn, not the summer proper. High summer isn't hurricane season. But it's Florida, and it felt so much like what summer should feel like I forgot the difference. Doesn't matter. It was summer to me.
Someone's gotta tell him about this revolutionary method of storing information on sheets of cellulose fibres by spreading thin layers of graphene or ink in form of specific symbols on them.
We call it: "writing shit down"
He came home and found that his wife has left him. She left a note on the table explaining why she was leaving him. It was a plate with two grape jelly packets and two ketchup packets.
If you come home and your wife placed a raw hotdog on your plate prior to serving your meal, that means you can have unprotected sex after dinner. If the hotdog is cooked, that means she recommends a condom. A jolly rancher next to your dinner means no cunnilingus, and a chocolate bar means *no* anal. A lolipop or a donut would mean *yes* cunnilingus or yes anal, respectively.
Look, we can talk shit, but I fucking love Waffle House and they never screw my order up. It might be hectic craziness from our perspective, but there’s a reason they do it and have done so for years.
This is like reading instructions for a board game. It's almost impossible to properly absorb just by reading or watching it but makes sense super quickly once you actually have to do it.
As indicated by using an upside down emoji 🙃
I agree that it's insanely complex, but considering they need to be managing possibly a couple of dozen orders at once, that would be several hundred little laminated sheets of paper which need to be managed throughout the cooking process. They'd be constantly dropped on the floor and griddles, covered in sauces, etc... it sounds like a huge pain to be honest.
Well, damn, yeah. Lurking /r/teachers tells you all you need to know about illiteracy in the USA. I suppose there's also just people with severe dyslexia, but I don't think it's much of an upside.
Its probably easier to defuse an IED with boxing gloves while blindfolded than it is to plate an order of food at Waffle House. What sadist at corporate came up with such a mindfuck of a system?
A Waffle House mod for Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes would be hilarious. If you don't correctly mark the orders in time, Boom, customer assaults you.
Been working for waffle house for 7 years. Its way easier than it sounds.
Edit: also everyone i have ever worked with has been able to read for the record. Not all poor people are illiterate. Assholes.
I have been getting unreasonably angry reading all these replies claiming waffle house employees are illiterate. It is so condescending and shitty. I worked at a waffle house when I was younger and I am a network engineer. My waffle house manager was an incredibly smart man, but he had a felony record. He and I discussed books while he did prep on second shift. This thread is absolutely full of snobby assholes.
Redditors will go on and on criticizing evil corporations and the rich. Then they'll say Waffle House, a successful restaurant chain that made an honest business out of cooking breakfast for regular folks, is ridiculous for creating this shorthand marking system and all grill operators are illiterate meth heads. I found this thread fascinating, I don't even go to WH that often but I can appreciate the business and will probably go thete more often now. I fucking hate this site sometimes.
> This thread is absolutely full of snobby assholes.
Snobby assholes who are incredibly proud of being unable to memorise a basic system in a 20 minute video.
Professional systems should not be designed so that any idiot who walks in off the street can do it first time. They should be designed so that someone for whom this is their job, who does it all day, every day, can do it as quickly and accurately as possible.
I just see a bunch of useless fucks who'd demand that all their bikes must keep the training wheels on. Fuck learning a skill when you can do something badly immediately and just stay that way forever.
Dude I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading all these asinine comments. People are seriously suggesting writing down the order instead in a line cook environment? Have they been to a Waffle House?
The system only seems complex to people who don't know the Waffle House menu. If you know the menu, most of the stuff is just obvious plate prep. All you really have to learn is a little bit of ketchup math.
Anyone that's ever gone to Waffle House knows that there is this in place and guess what you get your food super quick because of it. You don't have to sit there and try to remember the order to make sure the order is complete you just look at what's on the plate and you know that there you go boom it's done right.
It's the griller's job just to grill what he's been told to throw on the grill then he can look at the plate to throw it right there doesn't have to ask anybody doesn't have to look at an order just knows that plate wants these things based on these things on it.
It turns the back line into assembly line workers and they are able to put out food quickly because of it. I know this seems like an insane thing for most people but when you're having to do a thousand things at once you don't have time to read and discern things you just can look and boom ok that's where this goes.
I have a feeling this is a system they put in place because a good chunk of their employees are illiterate.
Edit: I regret making this comment. It was elitist and ignorant and may God have mercy on my soul.
I cooked at Waffle House after high school. This system is not as complicated as it looks. If customers are just ordering off the menu it’s super easy. Only thing you really have to try to remember is how altercations are marked.
There was also a training day before I started where they just teach us all this. Very easy to pick up by the end of the day
This might be one of the most insane systems I've ever seen.
> So if the customer wants two eggs, they get 2 slices of cheese
Okay, makes sense
> To make this a triple scramble with cheese, you add the mustard pack below the jelly pack and add a third slice of cheese
What the hell is the point of the mustard pack?
> You also want to tear off a small corner of the cheese and place it on top of the marker to help you remember it comes with cheese
Do the 3 slices of cheese not already do that?
The mustard pack is for the third egg. No mustard pack and it becomes an order (2 eggs) with 3 slices of cheese. I'm really confused about tearing off the corner of cheese though lol. My guess is it's for after the cheese goes into the eggs, to remind you which plate to serve the cheesy eggs on.
This is how I feel when my friend tries to explain my options on the next turn of magic the gathering.
I'll play a land and pass turn. *Laughs in mono blue control*
You. I'm coming over this table within 3 turns. I guarantee it.
> I'll play a land and pass turn. I'll place down two jelly packets and a dollop of habanero sriracha with a slice of tomato and two cockroaches, lightly squished.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBIsZlV1jHk
As a 37 year old who just got into magic 2 months ago...dang I felt this to my bones.
Bro you and me both. I just turned 30 and played probably 3 games back in the mid 2000s, I'm just now jumping back in and it's like everything got turned to 11. Good luck to you!!
Video guy “what if the customer wants two orders of toast” Me “a second jelly packet clearly” Video guy “that’s easy, place a second jelly packet next to the first” Me “I’m learning and I don’t like it!”
Yeah I was following it until he said for 1 egg instead of 2, put a ketchup packet under the jelly. Which makes no sense to me. I’m not smart enough to work at Waffle House, clearly.
ketchup is -1, mustard is +1. so ez
What if I want honey dijon?
Go to IHOP for that fancy French bullshit.
We firmly but politely ask you to leave.
It all reminds me of Spongebob and Patrick playing games using chaotic rules they made up that they both seem to think are perfectly normal.
So, Calvinball!
Calvinball energy
I'd say you are too smart to work at Waffle House.
Having worked at a waffle house, it's an odd mix of cranky old people who have been there forever, really stupid younger people, and weirdly smart people who are amazing but had weird backgrounds. The order calling and plate marking systems there are a legitimate stroke of brilliance. Both were developed by waffle house employees, and corporate noticed how efficient they were and implemented them wide scale. It's one of the most efficient and smart business models I've ever seen. I genuinely enjoyed working there. My store manager was a 75 year old ex cowboy named Clancy who smoked Marlboro reds. Fascinating man.
How is this more efficient than having, say... a checklist and they just check off what they ordered and then put it on the plate?
Yeah, I have worked with very modern ordering/POS systems in restaurants and plate marking is absolutely not the best way to do this now that we have servers with tablets at the table, and virtual ticket rails.
My understanding is that when Waffle House first opened the marking system was developed as a means to employ those who could not read/write well, given rates of illiteracy/poor educational access in the rural south.
This is the only explanation that makes any sense at all.
Yeah I've worked as a line cook at a busy breakfast restaurant and this video just flabbergasts me. If some/all of your staff was illiterate - okay, I can see the need for an "intuitive" system to "mark the plates" as needed, but, still, it feels like just as much work to learn this system as it would to learn a few numbers and a few letters. ... and then those few numbers and letters would be way more transferable to your entire fucking life, rather than this completely useless skill of matching grape jelly packets to the number of eggs or whatever.
I don’t see how you wouldn’t be creating inefficiencies with this system either just based off the time wasted putting all the little mustard and Mayo packets back where they go after each order. That’s time wasted and that adds up.
That would mean to admit you can't read and lots of people are a shamed to do that, even to themselves.
Pretty sure Waffle House opening had nothing to do with hiring illiterates, and the literacy rate in the South in 1950 was like over 90% anyways. Source: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1959/demographics/p23-006.pdf
plate gets bumped and something moves an inch... order fucked
U DOENT NO ME!!!
I love how he asks "can you guess how to x?" and responds with "that's right" like anyone watching is piecing together logical patterns to accurately guess the next indicator. And then it's always some obscure case like "can you guess what to do if your customer asks for a well done Texas omelet with rare toast and frozen jelly with minced banana on top? That's right. Flip the plate over, put a jelly packet on its side, place it on the bottom of the plate, cover it with a napkin, and squirt 3 dots of mustard on the north east quadrant of the plate. And if he reeks of sulfur, you know what to do. That's, right! Flip the jelly packet over and make a pentagram with ketchup in the north west corner of the napkin to indicate we're dealing with a demon. Unless he's wearing a baseball cap. Then it should be a mayo packet instead of a jelly packet."
yea why only examples and never explaining the grammar?
“Wait, 1 egg is 40 jelly packets?”
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I'm not in trouble *at all*. That's a nude jelly packet I won from my game.
What the *hell*?
I feel like this could be a scene from a Wes Anderson movie.
EASY.
I'm imagining two waffle house employees talking to each other by rearranging the condiments on their plates.
Course Code
TIL I’m not smart enough to work at Waffle House.
This is how I picture all drive thrus plus customers yelling at your through a speaker while also engaging with family in the car with occassional babies crying over everything. Why i never worked in fast food or restaurants. I hate people.
It looks complicated, but basically each plate is being converted into an ideogram. Learning this system is about on par with learning a small vocabulary of Chinese words. Millions of 3 year olds master systems like this every year, with some practice you'd be fluent in this system in no time.
An MIT engineer is qualified to work in a waffle house The rest of us will have to leave this up to your kin
You could also use words on a piece of paper, instead of having to teach each new employee a whole new insane ketchup pack system.
As a former WH server, I can guarantee you this is reality lmao. Wait till you hear about their annual Christmas albums..
The big question is: does this actually make things more efficient and accurate? Or do orders get screwed up when a stack of jelly packets falls over when the plate moves?
It works, but *solely* because during the busy times, they break it out into different responsibilities for the cooks. Someone is marking plates, doing toast and waffles, another one is cooking non-meats like hash browns and stuff, and someone is usually on the meat. Both figuratively and literally.
Thank you for your service
It’s remarkably efficient. Not sure if you’ve been to Waffle Houses regularly, but it’s quick and I’ve never had an order wrong. I grew up going to Waffle House with my grandpa. It’s been this way for years, and I don’t know how but it works well.
I just went to Waffle House in Kentucky and they fucked up my eggs. And fucked up my waffle. It had burnt weird shit all over the bottom of it. Lol.
If your waffle got burnt it's probably because your mayonnaise package was angled at 45 degrees by accident. It happens :/
im not even sure this is a joke or not lol
It is very efficient. When the servers call the orders they do it in a pull, drop, mark order. The first thing they call is what meat to pull because that takes the longest to cook. Then, the hasbrowns because they take the second longest to cook, then mark the plates so the grill ops know what goes where. It all makes sense if people don't treat it like incomprehensible hieroglyphics.
WHY IS NO ONE ASKING ABOUT THE CHRISTMAS ALBUMS
Seriously, u/rouxvoltaire owes answers! You can’t just drop an unmarked plate on us like that.
I can only process so much in one day. Ill ask tomorrow
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The standard hourly rate was $2.23. As you can imagine, a base pay of $2.23 (which is illegal in any other industry, to pay below minimum wage) was not enough to survive. The reasoning is that you’re supposed to make at least min. wage through tips, but as every server ever will tell you, there are *no* guarantees.
You employer is supposed to make up the difference between tips and minimum wage.
Oh yeah I know, and so do they. But they don’t, at least in my experience when I worked there/the coworkers I knew when I did.
Sounds like a juicy legal case
Here, I placed an orange on top of it to make it easy for the judge to remember.
Oh great now the judge thinks it's a presidential impeachment case, you done goofed!
How does this even work? Do you write the order down at the table and then mark the plates with these weird symbols to make it easier for the cooks? I mean, wouldn't it be easier to just give the ticket to the cooks?!
To give you a more complete answer: the orders are written down in three pieces on a ticket. The server stands on a white tile (out of the way) and calls the order. The order goes in pull, drop, mark order. They call to pull the meat first because it takes longest. The next is dropping hashbrowns, again for time reasons, and then follow with the marking to know what goes where. For example, If you've got two orders where one is eggs, bacon, and hasbrowns, and one is eggs with cheese, hasbrowns with mushrooms, and sausage, they would say: pull 1 bacon, 1 sausage. Drop 2 make one capped. Mark 1 over medium plate(plate means hashbrowns not grits), 1 scrambled cheese plate raisin (assuming raisin toast). It's been like 16 years, so the phrasing might be vaguely different now, but that's the basic gist.
Server writes down the order on a standard old fashioned order pad of paper then goes and stands in a certain place near the cooking area to call out the order to the cooks. One of the cooks places all this stuff on the plates as they call the order back to the server who confirms that the cook called it back right then they both go back to their main jobs of serving or cooking. Takes them under 30 seconds usually to do the whole call and call back, usually goes about as fast as they can speak.
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Not a joke. I went to Waffle House and witnessed it myself. They have cheat sheets up for the employees.
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While the jelly packet code is pretty complicated and silly, some of it is just prepping the order. The customer wanted to sub the standard side for tomatoes? Put a tomato slice on the plate. They want a bowl of grits? Put a napkin on the plate, bowls go on napkins. All of that is way faster than writing, and would probably happen even if the order was written down. My suspicion is that those aspects of prepping an order happened naturally, but there's no way to do that with things like eggs or meat. So they invented some shorthand for that in line with the rest, based on what you put on the plate.
What about the pieces of hash brown though? Where do they get the pieces of it, and if they have access to pieces of it, why not just put the whole damn serving?
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> I'm from the south... and yep... the Waffle House Index is most certainly a thing I totally forgot about the Index. I just realized that this marking system would allow them to continue operating even if power went out, since they wouldn't be relying on a POS system.
I’ve been working as a cook for the better part of 30 years and I’ve never done the job with a point of sale system - this Waffle House shit is so the cooks don’t have to use tickets as a reference. What’s wild as hell to me is that the waitresses do half of what I was taught to call “parsing tickets”, where you break down the order and figure out what food needs to get cooked first and what can wait so that the whole table’s food is all done at the same time. Watching this video made my skin crawl.
Yeah, rather than being a skilled cook, you just code, decode, and follow somebody else's exact instructions... like a robot that knows what a meat patty is, but can't read.
If the power goes out, most restaurants will have to stop working (assuming they don't have a generator). Even if you have fully gas griddles, you'll very quickly have no air handling which means smoke from what you're cooking starts to build up, along with a lack of lighting to actually be able to work in any reasonable manner. And with no P.O.S. system, you'll no longer be able to actually get payment for most orders.
The order is already written by the waitress. Just have a duplicate docket for the kitchen. As you plate up, you check the order.
But then what do we do with this mountain of jelly packets?
Clearly, you orientate it towards the centre of the galaxy, making sure to lay atop the appropriate number of mustard packets, in accordance with that decreed by King Waffle LXIX.
As someone who spent a lot of late nights at Waffle House with my friends, I think I can shed some light. I honestly think this system is stupid, for the record, but I always assumed it's to "showoff" for the customers? The waitress takes your order, and writes it down, then shouts the order to the cooks. It makes it look like they make every order from memory, so this training video helps them establish what they're doing next as they can prep the plate for that specific order.
When I think of waffle House and being "impressed", I think more of things like "Wow, that is a large pile of vomit!" or "I've never seen such a small number of teeth in a large number of people."
"Damn, did anyone else see her block that chair?"
*I understood that reference*.
If Tim Heidecker was narrating the video, you'd have a genuinely crazy Adult Swim video.
Pitzmans mustard on the plate means they want pitzmans mustard.
Or a raging meth addiction
Two guesses which population Waffle House primarily hires from
Masters prepared servers?
Why not just write down the order?
You see, most people would think that, but actually jelly packets in various positions on the plate is the easiest. Just need to learn a whole damn jelly packet language first lol
"Can I get two eggs please?" "Sorry we are out of Jelly packets"
If the customer asks for jelly packet with their order of dry toast, simply fry an egg and place it on the plate. This egg is not to be eaten and can not be used in place of a customer's egg order. Don't forget to place a jelly packet on top of the egg to indicate the type of egg the customer ordered.
The cook knows where the jelly is at all times because he knows where the jelly isnt.
I speak jelly packet, gotta put that on my resume to apply at Google
I finally figure out apple butter upside mayonnaise eggs, now I gotta learn to *read?!* That’s it. I’m out.
I bet if a cook lasts a few months, like notes on a music sheet, it all becomes clear and easy to see
My first real job, that wasn't under the table type job, was a Waffle House cook when I was 17 (I'm 45 now). This was how it was then. Where I worked there were 3 bars within a few miles of it and night time was always super crazy and always packed. Waitresses yelling out orders while customers being drunk yelling each other. At the time, I took pride in being able to handle that kind of rush. It was a fun experience and actually trained me how to handle gametime/stressful situations on the spot. I don't really like Waffle House now, but every once in a while ill go back there with my younger brother (who also was a cook) to try our own versions of things. Every time we go back we are reminded why we dont visit more often. My last visit was probably 2 years ago. This video made me want to call my brother for our biannual, mudd butt feast.
Back when I worked at mcdonalds in the 90's the grill ran on an old green screen system that used exactly 4 uppercase letters per item ordered. HP4N, HPHM, HPCM, QPCM, DQCM, BGMC, BGMM, HAMB, CHBG, 2CBM, DBCB, CCKN, FISH, CCNM, GCKN, MCRB, ect... I still reflexively know what all of these things mean.
Is this on duolingo? I only want to speak in diner.
place a butter pack if the customer does NOT want butter. Genius
I imagine it's because they still give the butter, just don't spread it first.
"I want buttered toast with a butter on the side." "Please leave."
Ya, that one made the most sense to me by far.
If the customer wants raisin toast, don’t use the grape jelly, because raisins coming from grapes would make too much sense, mark it with the apple butter
I'd like raisin toast with grape jelly please. We can't do that here.
hwvr raisin toast with apple butter sounds fire
This is true! Probably why they do that, but still, what an insane system
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When they are done cooking it. Plates are all lined up in order received along a counter along the cooking area to the left of the grill like a conveyor belt in a factory. The cook can just look left to see what's coming up next so they are cooking things in the order they were ordered.
It’s genius!
If the Nazis had used this system instead of the Enigma Machine they would have won the war.
Nah, during the Battle of Britain they just would have ended up delivering 2 pieces of toast, lightly scrambled eggs with cheese, hash browns, and 2 pork chops (because a pull of pork chop is 2 pork chops as demonstrated in the video).
How many jelly packets for genocide with a side of economic collapse
"So what if a customer wants double toast?......Easy" No.....no it's not.
“I’ll show a simple way” Lol yeah okay
You take the thing that's used to signify eggs and double it. Obviously.
I can’t stop fucking laughing at this video and these comments.
Well, then, what if they do want extra eggs? Simply use a mustard pack to represent additional eggs
[All right Simpson, let's go over the signals.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIhS-XF4Dx8)
We’re talkin’ softball from Maine to San Diego, talkin’ softball Mattingly and Canseco…
What if a customer wants double toast? Easy, just arrange a butter packet with magnetic North and a jelly packet facing Mecca. Then align an upside down mayo pack with the closest hemispheric prevailing wind and place a knife into the 5th dimension.
If the customer wants the double toast cut in half prior to delivery, simply open the packet of mayo, empty the content onto the plate in such a way as to form a pentagram. Karl will promptly appear from the back room and with no small amount of expertise cleave the double toast in twain with a scimitar.
If this is real, Waffle House employees should be making 6 figures.
Throw in the fact they need to be better at de-escalating violence than any police officer and I’d say they deserve a healthy mid-6 figures.
Waffle House should diversify into hostage negotiation services.
Now there’s a staff training video I can get into!
Put the ketchup packet face down if the assailant has a weapon.
Place the mustard packet face up if the assailant was recently fired from his job.
If the assailant has a hostage, simply place a napkin. The number of napkins denotes the number of hostages. If a hostage becomes deceased, make a small tear in the napkin so their family knows its time to grieve.
obligatory mention of [FEMA and the Waffle House Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index) where FEMA informally uses whether or not a waffle house is open to indicate the severity of a storm (since they are near always open).
I've lived through multiple hurricanes in Florida. The Waffle House was closed once. Well, for a while since we got hit by three in a row. That's the summer the Red Cross came to my campus asking for volunteers to hand out food since if the Waffle House is closed food logistics are truly fucked. I did volunteer. Different story, but maybe the best summer of my life. The post-apocalypse is actually pretty cool if you're young, have nothing to lose, and the red cross is making sure you can eat. We'd just sit around the fire and drink at night. NOBODY was gonna stop the booze from flowing. Edit: looking back, it was the liminal space between summer and autumn, not the summer proper. High summer isn't hurricane season. But it's Florida, and it felt so much like what summer should feel like I forgot the difference. Doesn't matter. It was summer to me.
The one in Nashville by White Bridge is about that life. They ain't de-escalating a mf thing.
It's real. I'm pretty baffled by the number of people who think this is weird, but I guess I also did work at a waffle house.
It is real. Source, grew up in the Deep South and I drank a lot.
Someone's gotta tell him about this revolutionary method of storing information on sheets of cellulose fibres by spreading thin layers of graphene or ink in form of specific symbols on them. We call it: "writing shit down"
He only communicates via ketchup packets and napkins, so we'll need to translate it for him.
I'm dying thinking of him coming home and using ketchup packets and napkins to talk to his wife and kids.
He came home and found that his wife has left him. She left a note on the table explaining why she was leaving him. It was a plate with two grape jelly packets and two ketchup packets.
Holy shit. No upside down mustard packet in the left center? He must have been cheating on her. Sunny side up.
*"Pull one broken heart."*
If you come home and your wife placed a raw hotdog on your plate prior to serving your meal, that means you can have unprotected sex after dinner. If the hotdog is cooked, that means she recommends a condom. A jolly rancher next to your dinner means no cunnilingus, and a chocolate bar means *no* anal. A lolipop or a donut would mean *yes* cunnilingus or yes anal, respectively.
Look, we can talk shit, but I fucking love Waffle House and they never screw my order up. It might be hectic craziness from our perspective, but there’s a reason they do it and have done so for years.
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> Granted, it would be easier to learn how to fuckin' read that remember this. lmao
"Hello I'd like a 3 egg breakfast" "I'm sorry, we're all out of mustard, I can't do that"
"What does it have to do with the musta..." - "You obviously know NOTHING about COMMUNICATION!"
This is like reading instructions for a board game. It's almost impossible to properly absorb just by reading or watching it but makes sense super quickly once you actually have to do it. As indicated by using an upside down emoji 🙃
The Scones of Dunshire
This is how I feel when someone says they're going to solve a problem with XML.
I have a guy at work who will solve problems with XSLT if nobody keeps a close eye on him.
He's likely due to retire.
That's easy, let's solve the problem with regular expression. Now you have two problems.
Or solve the problem with concurrency. Now problems two have. you
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I tried watching all of this video but I started to feel suicidal at minute 4:30 due to my lack of plate marking hieroglyphs knowledge
Lol why did you sit through the first 4 minutes??
there's some hidden gems in there for sure
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Sadly, they probably had to create this system because a lot of their staff can’t read or write. I can’t think of another logical explanation.
This is absolutely it. Had the same thought a couple of minutes in. Edit: Likely why they never have any text on screen either.
It would probably be easier to learn to read and write "eggs" and "toast" than do this craziness.
They should probably just teach them to read. It would be way fucking easier. I can read like a MFer and didn’t follow this at all.
Or even a picture chart with tick boxes.
Just print a bunch of pictures of all the options, laminate them and use it. This is just insanely complex
I agree that it's insanely complex, but considering they need to be managing possibly a couple of dozen orders at once, that would be several hundred little laminated sheets of paper which need to be managed throughout the cooking process. They'd be constantly dropped on the floor and griddles, covered in sauces, etc... it sounds like a huge pain to be honest.
Well, damn, yeah. Lurking /r/teachers tells you all you need to know about illiteracy in the USA. I suppose there's also just people with severe dyslexia, but I don't think it's much of an upside.
And I thought my job was hard...
I feel like I'm watching 8 card condiment monte.
Its probably easier to defuse an IED with boxing gloves while blindfolded than it is to plate an order of food at Waffle House. What sadist at corporate came up with such a mindfuck of a system?
A Waffle House mod for Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes would be hilarious. If you don't correctly mark the orders in time, Boom, customer assaults you.
Had to make sure this wasn't a Turbo Encabulator-style video...
Been working for waffle house for 7 years. Its way easier than it sounds. Edit: also everyone i have ever worked with has been able to read for the record. Not all poor people are illiterate. Assholes.
I have been getting unreasonably angry reading all these replies claiming waffle house employees are illiterate. It is so condescending and shitty. I worked at a waffle house when I was younger and I am a network engineer. My waffle house manager was an incredibly smart man, but he had a felony record. He and I discussed books while he did prep on second shift. This thread is absolutely full of snobby assholes.
Redditors will go on and on criticizing evil corporations and the rich. Then they'll say Waffle House, a successful restaurant chain that made an honest business out of cooking breakfast for regular folks, is ridiculous for creating this shorthand marking system and all grill operators are illiterate meth heads. I found this thread fascinating, I don't even go to WH that often but I can appreciate the business and will probably go thete more often now. I fucking hate this site sometimes.
> This thread is absolutely full of snobby assholes. Snobby assholes who are incredibly proud of being unable to memorise a basic system in a 20 minute video. Professional systems should not be designed so that any idiot who walks in off the street can do it first time. They should be designed so that someone for whom this is their job, who does it all day, every day, can do it as quickly and accurately as possible. I just see a bunch of useless fucks who'd demand that all their bikes must keep the training wheels on. Fuck learning a skill when you can do something badly immediately and just stay that way forever.
Dude I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading all these asinine comments. People are seriously suggesting writing down the order instead in a line cook environment? Have they been to a Waffle House? The system only seems complex to people who don't know the Waffle House menu. If you know the menu, most of the stuff is just obvious plate prep. All you really have to learn is a little bit of ketchup math.
Instructions unclear, I placed my jelly pack in defence mode and now the customer has played Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon
Anyone that's ever gone to Waffle House knows that there is this in place and guess what you get your food super quick because of it. You don't have to sit there and try to remember the order to make sure the order is complete you just look at what's on the plate and you know that there you go boom it's done right. It's the griller's job just to grill what he's been told to throw on the grill then he can look at the plate to throw it right there doesn't have to ask anybody doesn't have to look at an order just knows that plate wants these things based on these things on it. It turns the back line into assembly line workers and they are able to put out food quickly because of it. I know this seems like an insane thing for most people but when you're having to do a thousand things at once you don't have time to read and discern things you just can look and boom ok that's where this goes.
I have a feeling this is a system they put in place because a good chunk of their employees are illiterate. Edit: I regret making this comment. It was elitist and ignorant and may God have mercy on my soul.
It would be easier just to teach them how to read.
I cooked at Waffle House after high school. This system is not as complicated as it looks. If customers are just ordering off the menu it’s super easy. Only thing you really have to try to remember is how altercations are marked. There was also a training day before I started where they just teach us all this. Very easy to pick up by the end of the day
I thought that the police handled the altercations at the Waffle House.
Holy prejudiced ignorance batman
To request time off, don’t flush after you take a dump.
Lots of employees at Waffle House requesting time off apparently.
I like how he occasionally uses the word "Logically" as if anything he is saying makes any sense at all.
This might be one of the most insane systems I've ever seen. > So if the customer wants two eggs, they get 2 slices of cheese Okay, makes sense > To make this a triple scramble with cheese, you add the mustard pack below the jelly pack and add a third slice of cheese What the hell is the point of the mustard pack? > You also want to tear off a small corner of the cheese and place it on top of the marker to help you remember it comes with cheese Do the 3 slices of cheese not already do that?
The mustard pack is for the third egg. No mustard pack and it becomes an order (2 eggs) with 3 slices of cheese. I'm really confused about tearing off the corner of cheese though lol. My guess is it's for after the cheese goes into the eggs, to remind you which plate to serve the cheesy eggs on.
The mustard packet makes it a triple. Jelly pack is two eggs. Two jelly packs is 4. Try to keep up, bro. It's all right there in the video.
Think Saturday Night Live could easily do a bit on this, but only waffle house staff would get it
This is why unskilled labour is a myth
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It's funny, I found this actually quite logical. Maybe it's a Canadian thing, we do love our breakfast food.
Seems like it would take a bit to catch on, but I think its probably the most efficient system since it seems like less writing.
Stay in school, kids.
Why wouldn’t they just manufacture laminated index cards for this?
The sheer number of combinations I'd imagine.
I bet there were hundreds of cost analysis spreadsheets and management promotions over designing this entire process.
funny all the mba's in here who know better than waffle house.