Long, long ago, when I used to waitress… (do you like how I make myself sound older than I feel?) we had to wade into the crowd of waiting, hungry patrons to find the faces matching the right name on our list. Sometimes, people got too hungry and too tired of waiting. They would suddenly abandon the lobby, blazing a hot trail to McDonald’s.

The tough part was, we never knew if the party had already left. It would have helped if we had paging systems.