CSU Long Beach
ENGR 350
Computers, Ethics, and Society

Syllabus
Schedule
Grading
Portfolio
Homework:
  Guidelines
  Standards
  1 - Images
  2 - Risks
    -- example
  3 - Infobahn
    -- example
  4 - Dataveillance
    -- example
  5 - Worklife
    -- example
  6 - Killer Robot
Term project

HW5 - example

WORKLIFE

Instructor's note: although this paper lost points in the "writing" section, it is an excellent example of real personal experience, interestingly presented and thoughtfully analyzed from the perspective of the course.

Writing:
5 __Spelling and syntax errors caught by Word (max. 5, -1 per error)
1 __Other errors (e.g., word usage), not caught by Word (max. 5, -1 per error)
9 __Readability and organization (10 max.)
9 __Relevant and correct use of sources (10 max., 0 here may mean 0 on the assignment).

Content:
10 __Did you do what the assignment asked for? (10 max., 0 here may mean 0 on the assignment)
10 __Did you show real understanding of the course material? (10 max.)
10 __Did you go beyond the "minimum" to analyze the topic in depth? (10 max.)

54 __Total (60 max.)

"Hey, Jim! I am five orders behind!" I shouted at the general manager standing beside the soft drink dispensing machine.

"Ok! Where are you on the screen?" He turned back and asked the two sandwich makers in the kitchen.

"Two double cheeseburgers for drive through. Sir!" Answered one whom wiped some sweat off her face while looking up at the blue screen above her head.

"Excuse me! I ordered a spicy chicken. But I got a 99 cents double stack instead." I turned my eyes away from the kitchen and saw a middle-aged man standing before me, holding forward a quarter pound sandwich on a foil wrap.

"What? Oh, I’m sorry. But what was your order, sir?

The man babbled while I frantically tried to go back on my own screen to find the man’s order. But this aroused a round of protests from the kitchen, "Owh, Owh, Owh, what are you doing? Pengfei, we are done with those orders!" All the sandwich makers shouted vigorously and watched in horror as the orders they just finished serving jumped back on their screen one and a time from the right margin of the blue background while the current ones disappeared off to the left.

"Ah, sorry, sorry, there it is! I found your order, sir." I looked up at the disgruntled man still standing before me and said with a smiling face. Then I took the dripping burger from his hand, walked over to the sandwich makers, put the burger on their work counter, pointed my finger at the "Spicy chicken" under the order #xxxxx on the screen and said, "You made a double stack instead of a chicken, get it right, quick."

As I was saying this, two feet away, the grill man was going ballistic on the French fry guy.

"Why did you put it on chicken when you dropped fish down." He said angrily while holding a chunk of overcooked fish meat with a spatula. He pointed to the LCD read out on the instrument panel of the fry machine and said :"Look! You press this button once, it is fish, twice, it is chicken, see, yes, that’s right, Fi means fish, Ck means chicken." The GM standing beside the drive through window interrupted his little lecture for the fry guy.

"Hey! How much longer on those fries?"

The fry guy turned away from the grill man looked down at another LCD read out, shouted back :"14 more seconds."

"Spicy chicken is up!" The sandwich maker slammed my burger on the shiny order holder. Then she pushed a little button with a left pointed arrow shape on it to delete those old orders I had just backtracked onto his screen.

I grabbed the chicken burger, walked back to my register machine and handed it back to the waiting man. "Oh…, I waited so long I’m not hungry anymore." He let out a long sigh, mumbled, then walked away."

"Carlos! I told you a dozen times now! You press the "Enter" key after you key in each item of the order. That way the sandwich people see it right away on their screen so they can get on it faster. Don’t wait until you key in the whole order to do it." An assistant manager was getting mad at Carlos again. The poor guy probably never touched a keyboard in his life before becoming a cashier.

"Bee, bee, bee…." The fryer beeped vigorously while the fry guy picked the basket out of the boiling oil and shouted for all to hear, "Fry’s up!" Then he pressed a button beside the red LCD to stop the beeping.

"Excuse me! But I’ve waited five minutes for my hamburger! What’s going on here?" A fat blonde woman questioned me.

"Oh, I’m sorry. But let me see what I can do." I smiled and walked back to the kitchen.

The sandwich makers’ screen was now filled with line after line and column after column of orders. Against a deep blue background, all the orders were printed out on neat roman characters with uniform fonts. Some like that woman’s hamburger were flashing crazily, reminding us that it was ordered a good while ago but have yet to be served. Some had unique colors, or followed by phrases such as "ex ketchup". Still others are enclosed in pinkish rectangles, which meant they were deleted from the order.

"What the heck? We are holding up on drive through!" The GM came over and looked up at the screen. "Where are you?" He asked the #1 sandwich maker.

"Here, the single cheese with no onion." She took a precious second off her hushed robotic routine and pointed at the screen. A short and stuffy woman, she had to stand on her toes to do this. "Just keep working on those floor orders, I’ll take care the drive through. Remember yours are on the second row on the screen. The drive through is the top row." She turned and reminded the #2 sandwich maker whom was working beside her.

Carlos ran over and said nervously, "See that double with no lettuce on the screen, don’t make it. I pressed the wrong key."

"Why don’t you delete it?" Asked the GM annoyingly.

"I can’t. It won’t let me delete after I pushed the "Enter" key." Carlos answered then run back to his register.

"Hamburg is up! For the front."

I took my burg, walked back to my post, handed it to the angry woman, and then said with a smiling face, "I’m really sorry for the delay, but we just put in a new computer system and we are still trying to get used to it."

The fat woman walked away grumbling. With a smiling face, I went on to take the next order. "Hello Sir, welcome to Wendy’s, how can I help you today?"

"Bee, bee, bee…." The fryer beeped again in the background. I could also hear the #1 and #2 sandwich makers talking, "Oops, I just deleted an order off your part of the screen." "Oh, just push that back arrow key to get it back, yes, that’s good."

"Bee, bee, bee…."

It has been more than two years since I last worked for that Wendy’s restaurant in rural north Florida. Yet those chaotic scenes at rush hours still remain deeply imprinted in my mind. Although I have worked at a number of other restaurants, none was more technically up to date. Yet my experiences tell me that the technical advancement or the computerization of the workplace in a restaurant setting does not necessarily or automatically result in improved productivity and increased profitability.

A main handicap facing computerization of restaurants is the special characteristic of the employees. Because typically restaurant employees earn minimum wage, the industry’s employee pool consists of mostly poorly educated adults and high school dropouts. First it is difficult to train these people to be technical proficient. And even if a restaurant provides sufficient training it is hard to retain those technically proficient employees at a low wage level. The annual turn over rate for restaurant employees at this country currently runs at 90%. Employees flock from one restaurant to another for a variety of personal reasons or inability to maintain employment at the previous one. Although I worked at that Wendy’s for only three month, when I left I was one of the most senior employees there. I saw an almost total turnover of employees in only three months. Therefore a computerized restaurant is caught in a dilemma. Although it needs to have professionally as well as technically skillful employees to operate, it also must realize that the learning and training could be a wasted effort since most of the employees would soon move on to other jobs.

Another handicap facing computerization of restaurant is the unbalanced empowerment of the workforce. Take my experience for example, the computerized cash registers machines at Wendy’s enabled the cashiers to take orders much faster than other traditional methods. Yet the computerization method does not increase the pace of the kitchen production correspondingly. Cooking meat on grill, making sandwiches and dropping French fries are still done by hands. Therefore when orders are coming into the kitchen at a much faster rate, the kitchen staff often lags far behind. This unbalanced empowerment of workforce in a restaurant setting contributes to more mistakes and less satisfaction for the customers. Martin Baily best explains this in his article Great Expectations: PCs and Productivity. In it, Baily probes the difficult task of measuring productivity in computerized service industries. He writes :"…the hardest task in assessing productivity is measuring real output-the value of goods and services produced…." This explains the increasing popularity of computerization to restaurants despite dubious research findings.

Applying Baily’s logic to my experiences. The faster cash registering system allow more orders to be taken per hour. And this results in more orders taken thus more gross profits per week. While the number and the total wages of the employees and the food costs remain roughly unchanged, the net profits of a restaurant can enjoy a good boost after computerization. It might seem that productivity must surely have gone up. Yet the truth is that only the productivity of the cashiers have gone up a lot. That of the kitchen staff could not possibly go up by much more than the traditional level. Unless computerization brings real sandwich making robots into the kitchen, productivity there is rigidly restrained by human physical capability.

However despite all these, one area where computerization truly increases productivity is in management. Again referring to my own experiences, Wendy’s implemented a network of workstations in the managers’ offices of all the branch stores. Each workstation contains an array of software designed to help the managers with the numerous tasks involved with running restaurants. No longer must the managers copy down the work hours off paper punch cards and log them by hands. Each employee is issued an ID card for clock in and out. One swipe of the card through a device much like a credit card reader, the employee’s hour is automatically entered on the database of the managers’ workstation. Then the manager simply tallies the total by clicking the mouse and sends the data to headquarter through modem. Other program helps the managers keep detailed knowledge on the amount of food served gross profits, accounting, employee records, inventory, etc.

Many good example of this type of computer software can be found at the web site of Restaurant Technology, inc., where the demos of an assortment of management software are posted. These software eases the workload of the management, enhances the accuracies of the work done, and enable them to spend more time actually supervising the employees in running the stores. Ultimately this results in higher quality of as well as a more productive management. Just like Rob Kling writes in his article The Centrality of Organizations:"…many computer applications improve the quality of the work done…." Yet we must be aware that the increased productivity of the management does not necessarily translate into more productivity of the workforce as a whole.

Computerization at the restaurant industry has been going on for many years. And the technology has come a long way. From computer controlled cooking equipment to taking orders through the web (for example, pizza-hut), the level of technical sophistication has been rising steadily. Yet to date few social or computer scientists have looked seriously at its effects on the grass root operation of the food service industry, namely the interaction between the members of the employees, the managers and the customers. Many researchers focus more in exploring the issue of computerization within a more professionally oriented or shall we say "white-collar" organizational setting. However I believe that if the industry wants to gain the maximum benefits from computerization, more study should be done. I think there will be many interesting results, which will not hinder the progress of computerization but facilitate it in ways we can not imagine now.