No restaurant could possibly do less to preselect customers or filter out undesirable ones. That’s because no restaurant has a reservation system like Schwa’s. It’s a one-man operation, and to the regret of all Chicago, that man is Carlson. He complains that he is always getting terrible ratings on Web sites such as Metromix, not because the people who eat at Schwa dislike the food but because people who don’t eat at Schwa are enraged when they can’t get in. The entire system consists of a cordless phone with voice mail, but it accepts fewer than seventy messages at a time and invariably announces to callers that it is full.
Carlson, who usually has no difficulty blaming himself for whatever goes wrong in his life, in this case blames the designer of the phone. “It’s badly engineered,” he complains. “The guy who did it should be fired. When I put it under my chin, I hit the hang-up button.” Ory, the cook and former systems administrator, offers a possible explanation for the difficulty of communicating with Schwa: Carlson is inept at anything involving electronics. “I went to a restaurant trade convention with him,” Ory says. “I registered in five seconds. It took Michael like twenty minutes.”
When Carlson does pick up the phone, which is not often, the people on the line tend to gasp, “I can’t believe I got through.” (That’s Carlson’s portrayal, and that’s exactly what I did.) Then they start scrambling mentally, trying to remember what they planned to say and what day they hoped to reserve. When he returns a call to a potential customer, which is not often, his customer-service stylings are unique. This is what I overheard: “Hey, man, this is Michael from Schwa, man. Did I wake you up, man?” A huge percentage of his sentences end with the word man. Carlson is the last hipster dude.
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