> I reckon even a restaurant with a modern POS system would be problematic to switch to paper, ad-hoc. it would be slower and a couple more orders might get me

> I reckon even a restaurant with a modern POS system would be problematic to switch to paper, ad-hoc. it would be slower and a couple more orders might get messed up, but it's not that big of a problem. a lot of restaurant POS systems are just a calculator with a touchscreen that prints two tickets per order (one for the kitchen, and one for the servers) and tells you how much to charge the customer. then the kitchen spikes their copy when they finish the order, and the server spikes theirs after they bring it to the table. on fancier ones, the tickets are just shown on a screen and you "spike" them by pressing the done button. anybody who understands how to do their job in the first place can emulate the digital system on pen-and-paper. in fact, the POS went down more than once when I worked in restaurants, and this is exactly what we did.