Saturday

Got my first MVS on-call problem. It was pretty minor -- but I handled it, nonetheless, without assistance. Well, unless you count bouncing an opinion off my wife, but I do that with just about everything. So, I'm pretty pleased.

Less pleasing was our experience at a local restaurant, where we waited for just over an hour to be seated. The food was decent, but no food is worth waiting an hour for. I find myself wondering what the economics are of something like that. For example, in any given week, how much time can you sustain at, say, 50% of capacity if you have other times when you're at 100% -- or even 100+ (which, in computer performance terms, means that you have work to do 100% of the time plus you have work that would have gotten dispatched if you had had an engine to dispatch it on). My guess is that a restaurant thats open seven nights a week can sustain three sub par nights if it has one par and two or three super-par. What you'd like to see is them sizing the capacity of the place for peak periods, but thats not optimal (man, its eerie how performance and capacity problems in computer systems map so easily to performance and capacity problems elsewhere). So you likely shoot for about 80% of max, accepting that you're going to make people wait at peak periods. (Which, I bet, is why they occasionally came through with free samples: to assuage the grumbles.). I wonder: would it be fair to let people in at the head of the line who are willing to pay more? And, if they did, how would that affect sales to everyone else? How would you model something like that? If I were to drop a line to their corporate headquarters, think they'd tell me?

Each TGIChilis is locally owned and operated. We're sorry that you had a distressing experience at your local TGIC. We recommend that you bring your concerns to the local owners for resolution. Thank you for contacting TGIChilis, where service is our middle name. Well, actually, its GI, but, umm....