rambling is delicious

Had an interesting idea tonight while out with Bryce while we were out for dinner, getting bad service… My idea was a restaurant where the amount of service time you receive from your waiter is justified by the amount of money you’re spending.

Essentially, you come in, which entitles you to maybe a few mins of waiter time. Spend, say $10, which buys you a few more mins… By the time you’ve spent $100 (for example) you’ve paid for a chat with the waiter at the end of the night.
At the end (checkout point), if you haven’t had your allocated service time, the place gives you a discount or some amount off your bill, or something.

The best part is that this would encourage hospitality people to actually notice their customers and to pay attention – with real money as an incentive, I’d expect that using the allocated service time would become a KPI for staff or something..

Maybe that’s just my annoyance at having to hunt repeatedly for table service to get a drink talking.

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I don’t normally post my nerdy tid-bits here, but we did something totally cool today.
We built a pseudo-purchasing system (ie shopping / “add to cart”) revolving entirely around functionality in an ORM and PHP’s built in session handling.

The beauty of it all, is that once our logic validates the cart is ready and all processing is done, all that is required is calling $object->save();, and the ORM takes care of persisting it all.

I’m a little inspired with how easy this was, and how well it really worked (it seriously was awesome).. I’m going to put some thought into other ways that code libraries that I already use can be put to use with their “in the box” features, but in an “outside the box” kind of way.