Being a waiter...

Fairly simple mission - you are a waiter.

It's a manageable pizza centre - at the max. you would have just have three customers. The customers are frequent visitors and sit at "their" places only.

So, as already said, you are a waiter. Once the customers come in, you go to them, take their order and pass it on to the cook, who works from a floor above. You then go to the base of the stairs and ask the cook to pass on the pizza to you. And he launches it in air and you collect it correctly and deliver it to your customer, who has it and then leaves.

If you are still wondering why the aerial pizza transfer, it is supposed to be recommended by some management 'experts' who worked out that it saved 2.628 seconds/pizza, which is the time taken by the waiter to climb up the stairs and back. Also, the aerial transfer cooled the fiery hot pizza to eatable levels, which reduced the starting time by customers to munch into the pizza.

So, this is the routine. Forgot to tell you about customer patience. Every customer would wait only for a particular time for their pizzas. Surprisingly, the waiting time for these customers is similar at the same period of time.

Should tell something about the customers - the two guys sit facing the table while the lady sits on her side facing the other seats. If you have any reasons why it is so, please inform.

Once you are so used to leisurely serving these three customers, welcome to a new person - the bartender or whatever you call a person distributing bottles around. Distribution here is again aerial, with bottles flying around to their destinations. You don't want to knocked down by any of the bottles. Customers would be disappointed to see their pizzas demolished.

Soon, you'll get used to the bottles and delivering pizzas on time - the customers also get used to it. They soon expect you to be delivering the pizzas faster, now that you have more experience. It gets more tough as they expect the same from the bottle-tender too.

You can guess now what happens after a length of time. Impatient customers, quick bottle-tender, and the cook who's able to increase the rate of making pizzas at ease.

After the worst is over, the place relaxes a bit and customers are a bit more accommodating. It slowly increases again. Reminds you of the sawtooth wave? :-)

At this pace, it is easy to miss out times - the odd angry customer, the dropped pizza (the flying pizza from the cook), a bottle on the head. You are excused at times, but once it keeps happening three times, you'll have to relinquish the position and the impression that you can handle the pressure of pace.

Don't worry, you can start all over again, right at the start of the leisurely age.

That is summary of one of my favorite little LCD games, played at childhood. Made by Casio, it was very interesting and gripping (back then!).

The name is 'Funny Waiter'.

Pictures - Cover - Handheld

List of other Casio handhelds

:-)