Risk assessment: saying "you too" to the waiter

Hazard: reflexive reciprocation of a non-reciprocal pleasantry Reference incident: "enjoy your meal" / "you too," a restaurant, 2017 Assessment requested by: the person who said it, at 2AM, several thousand times

#Hazard description

The waiter delivers the food and issues a closing pleasantry: enjoy your meal. The pleasantry is one-directional. It has a sender and a recipient and no return path. The recipient's mouth, operating on autopilot at conversational latency, selects the all-purpose reply — you too — and fires it before the review board convenes.

The waiter is not going to enjoy your meal. The waiter is not going to enjoy any meal. The waiter is at work.

#Likelihood

Certain. This is the finding that reframes the entire assessment: the event is not a risk, it is a schedule. Our survey of available humans found no adult who has not done it, and a substantial cohort who did it within the last month, including two respondents who did it during the survey, to us, on the way out.

Adjacent strains are equally active: "happy birthday" / "you too." "Good luck with the surgery" / "you too." At the gate: "enjoy your flight" / "you too," issued to an agent who will remain in the airport indefinitely — a species of exchange whose asymmetry we last charted in the dental chair, where at least one party had an excuse in their mouth.

#Severity, by exposed party

The waiter: none. This must be stated clinically because the exposed population refuses to believe it. The waiter has received "you too" upward of four thousand times. It does not register as an error. It registers as weather — table six is raining slightly, move on. Our interviews with service staff produced no memory of any specific incident, ever, from any of them, and one waiter who confessed the reverse exposure: he once answered a customer's "thank you" with "you're welcome, love you," and — this is the important part — the customer doesn't remember that either.

You: nine years and counting. The incident of record occurred in 2017 and is still in active rotation, surfacing at 2AM between other archived incidents, fresh as the night it shipped. Severity is calculated not from the event but from the replay count, and the replay count is not under anyone's control, and the replays have started adding detail that we are not certain was in the original.

#Mitigations assessed

Prevention. Rehearsing the correct reply ("thanks") ahead of the pleasantry. Rejected: the hazard fires below the rehearsal layer. In trials, subjects who pre-loaded "thanks" said "thanks, you too."

Recovery. The mid-air correction — "you too... n't," or the appended "I mean, enjoy your shift" — was assessed and is hereby prohibited. The correction converts a zero-severity event for the waiter into a nonzero one, because now there is a conversation about it. The original error is invisible. The patch is not. Ship the error.

Exposure avoidance. Never being spoken to kindly by staff again. Rejected on quality-of-life grounds, though two survey respondents indicated they had already implemented it.

#Residual risk

Full. Residual risk is full. You will do it again — the schedule holds — and it will cost the waiter nothing, and it will cost you a decade, and the exchange rate between those two figures is the actual subject of this document.

#Findings

The 2AM review board that replays the incident has never once summoned the other party's testimony, because the other party has none. The event you are serving a life sentence for does not exist in the memory of its only victim. You are the sole survivor of an accident that didn't happen. The board should note this. The board will not note this. The board is you, and the board has never once ruled in your favor.

Filed without recommendation, except this: the waiter said enjoy your meal because it was his job, and you said you too because some reflex in you wants strangers to have good things, and of the two sentences, yours was the only one that meant anything.

Related: missing: one sock — another proceeding where the record mattered more to one party than the universe. And if your reflexes need somewhere to file their grievances at full volume, airplane invaders is boarding forever, and nobody at that gate says anything kind.