Staff tablet issues

This page picks up from there, for any restaurant already running tickets through the tablet day to day.

01What the tablet does when it loses connection

A tablet on a restaurant's own network can lose its connection without anyone at the pass noticing right away — a router hiccup, a busy network during a rush, a dead zone in one corner of the kitchen. When that happens, the tablet doesn't go blank or freeze on an error. It switches to an explicit offline mode and says so directly, naming its own state plainly and stating outright that what's on screen is the last thing it actually received rather than a live view — neither fact left for whoever's looking to guess at from a frozen-looking queue.

Every station screen also carries a small, constantly-updating status line showing whether it's synced or offline, and how long ago — reading something like “Synced 2 minutes ago · 6:42 PM” while connected, or “Offline 4 minutes ago · 6:44 PM” once the connection actually drops. The exact minutes and time change with every passing moment; the format — synced or offline, how long ago, and the clock time — is what stays constant. That line is worth checking first, before assuming anything else is wrong — it's the one honest, constantly-current answer to “is this actually working right now.”

02What still works while offline, and what doesn't

Offline mode isn't all-or-nothing. Some things keep working locally and catch up once the connection returns; others genuinely can't be trusted until it's back. Four things keep working normally, without needing the connection restored first:

• The queue as of the last sync — orders already on screen stay visible.
• Advancing an order's fulfillment stage locally; it syncs once the connection returns.
• Marking items unavailable; it syncs once the connection returns.
• Sound and visible alerts for anything already queued on this tablet.

Three things are genuinely stale until the connection comes back, worth knowing so nobody assumes the screen is showing something it isn't:

• New orders placed since the last sync will not appear until reconnected.
• The quoted wait time shown to callers may not reflect a change made elsewhere.
• Alerts acknowledged on another device will not update here yet.

03Labels that differ from what you'd expect

A few labels on the tablet read differently from what the same underlying thing is called elsewhere, worth knowing so nothing looks like a mismatch when it's actually just a different screen's own wording.

The fulfillment stages move one direction only, and each stage's own button is the only way to advance it — there's no way to skip ahead or move a ticket backward from the tablet itself. The payment label difference is worth understanding rather than treating as a mismatch to fix: the tablet's own version of payment status is deliberately narrower than the operator console's — the kitchen and the pass need one plain answer to “has this been paid for,” glanceable from across the room, not the fuller breakdown a manager reconciling accounts later actually needs. “Card paid” and “Paid” describe the same real fact; they're two screens built for two different moments.

04Alerts, and what acknowledging one actually does

The alerts screen separates what still needs attention from what's already been handled, and shows how many of each right at the top — a group labelled “Unacknowledged,” with a count. Acknowledging a station alert never changes the underlying order — clearing it from the unacknowledged list records who cleared it and when, but an order's actual fulfillment stage only ever changes through that order's own advance control, never as a side effect of clearing an unrelated alert. Dismissing a notice about an order is a different action from doing anything to the order, on purpose, so nobody accidentally treats “I saw this” as “I handled this.”

The kinds of things that actually show up here are worth knowing before the first one arrives. A severe allergy flagged on an order that needs confirming with the customer before handoff. A replacement ticket that's already been paid for once, with a note not to charge the card again. A wait time that changed and hasn't been seen by everyone yet. None of these should sit unread for long, which is exactly why the unacknowledged count sits where it does — visible the moment the screen opens, not buried behind a tap.

05A slow reconnect, worked through

A tablet loses its connection mid-service — the kitchen's wifi drops for a stretch during a busy Friday night. Nobody notices immediately, because the queue on screen doesn't change: the orders that were already there stay exactly where they were, and the person running the pass keeps working through them normally.

A new order comes in during the outage. It doesn't appear. There's no error, no obvious sign anything's wrong — the screen simply doesn't grow, because a new order is exactly the kind of thing this device can't show until it reconnects. Someone glances at the status line and sees “Offline,” with a growing number of minutes next to it, and understands immediately why the queue's stopped changing.

The kitchen keeps advancing the tickets already on screen — marking them in progress, then ready, then complete — because that part works locally regardless of the connection. A few minutes later, the wifi comes back. The status line flips to “Synced” with a fresh timestamp, and whatever orders came in during the gap appear all at once, along with anything that changed elsewhere while the tablet was out of touch.

06When something looks wrong

• The tablet shows nothing at all — a blank or frozen screen. Check the sync status line first; if it's still updating (even if it reads “offline”), the tablet is alive and just disconnected — see the offline behavior above. If the status line itself isn't updating, that's a different, harder failure worth restarting the device for before anything else.
• An alert seems to have been missed because sound was off. The visible alert still fires regardless of sound — a muted or denied sound permission doesn't hide it, only the audio half of it. If an alert genuinely wasn't seen, check whether it's sitting in the unacknowledged group rather than assuming it never arrived.
• A ticket says “Replacement — do not re-charge” and it's unclear why. That means the order changed after the original ticket already went out — the restaurant already has an earlier version, and this one supersedes it rather than doubling the order. See Marking an item unavailable if the change itself, rather than the replacement ticket, is what needs explaining.
• The tablet reads “offline” but the wifi looks fine. A visibly connected network doesn't always mean the tablet's own sync succeeded — check the “last synced” time specifically rather than the wifi icon alone; a stale sync with a healthy-looking connection usually resolves itself within a short wait, and is worth a device restart if it doesn't.
• Two different tablets in the same kitchen show different queues. Check the sync status on each one individually — a tablet that dropped its connection more recently, or reconnected more recently, than another one nearby can genuinely be a few orders behind it until both catch up, which isn't the same thing as either one being broken.