The Spoon

The other day I took some friends of mine out to a new restaurant. When the waiter took our order, I noticed that he carried a spoon in his shirt pocket. It seemed a little strange, but I ignored it. However, when another waiter brought our water and utensils, I noticed that he too had a spoon in his shirt pocket. Looking around the restaurant I saw that all the staff seemed to have spoons in their pockets.

When the waiter came back to serve our soup I asked, "Why the spoon? "
"Well," he explained, "half a year ago, the restaurant's owners hired Anderson Consulting, experts in efficiency, in order to revamp all our processes. After several months of statistical analysis, they concluded that customers drop their spoons 73.84 percent more often than any other utensil. This represents a drop frequency of approximately 3 spoons per table per hour. If our personnel is prepared to deal with that contingency, we can reduce the number of trips back to the kitchen and save 1.5 man-hours per shift."

As luck would have it I dropped my spoon and he was able to replace it with his spare spoon. "I'll get another spoon next time I go to the kitchen instead of making an extra trip to get it right now", he said.
I was rather impressed.

The waiter served our main course and I continued looking around. I then noticed that there was a very thin string hanging out of the waiter's fly. Looking around, I noticed that all the other waiters had the same string hanging from their flies. Now I got really curious and before he walked off, I asked the waiter, "Excuse me, but can you tell me why you have that string right there?"

"Oh, certainly!" he answered, lowering his voice. "Not everyone is as observant as you. That consulting firm I mentioned earlier also found out that we can save time in the restroom. See, by tying this string to the tip of the penis, we can pull it out over the urinal without touching it and that way eliminate the need to wash our hands, thus shortening the time spent in the restroom by 76.39 percent."

"Okay, that makes sense", I said, "but . . . if the string helps you get it out, how in hell do you get it back in again?"

"Well", he whispered, lowering his voice even further, "I don't know about the others but . . . as for me, I use the spoon."