Technology Has Finally Gone Too Far

Slate.com - A Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup called E La Carte is hoping to ensure that no family has to endure a restaurant nightmare again. It has produced a kind of souped-up iPad that lets you order and pay right at your table. The brainchild of a bunch of MIT engineers, the nifty invention, known as the Presto, might be found at a restaurant near you soon.
It works like this. The company manufactures tablet computers with full-day battery lives and a credit-card reader attached. The interface is easy enough for a grade-schooler to use. You select what you want to eat and add items to a cart. Depending on the restaurant's preferences, the console could show you nutritional information, ingredients lists, and photographs. You can make special requests, like "dressing on the side" or "quintuple bacon." When you're done, the order zings over to the kitchen, and the Presto tells you how long it will take for your items to come out. Want a margarita in the meantime? Just add it on the console. When you're through with your meal, you pay on the console, splitting the bill item by item if you wish and paying however you want. And you can have your receipt emailed to you.

Talk about a bad news Friday...First my boss asks me to actually show up to work on time for once, and now this: computers replacing waiters & bartenders at restaurants.

A younger, college-aged Rmurdera just shed a tear at that thought. Don't get me wrong; I'm all for technology helping businesses be more efficient & lower operational costs (as a matter of fact I basically sell technology that does exactly that), but not at the cost of college kids getting to experience the awesomely incestuous world of waiting tables & bartending.

In my opinion, it is every man's right to work at a restaurant that embraces the culture of all the employees hooking up with each other; otherwise I may have gone through all of college without touching a boob. The restaurant culture just works so well with the already ridiculous college lifestyle. You work with a group of people your age, hopefully most of them attractive, until the late hours, then you party all night until the sun comes up. After you sleep the morning & most of the afternoon away, again hopefully with someone attractive in your bed with you, you drag your ass back to the restaurant to spend another 8 hours performing for tips...and those tips are in cash, sweet non-government reported cash. Then you cycle back to the partying & hooking up with a different girl that works in your restaurant. Sure there's gonna be that awkwardness when you have to work a shift with 3 different girls, all of whom you've recently hooked up...especially when they don't yet know about each other, but that's what the restaurant life is all about. Doing stupid shit and not paying the consequences.

Bottomline: This is an incredible thing for a college student, and I will not stand by and watch robots take that god-given right away from them.