The Assumption of the Average

Every so often, it occurs to me that I've duped myself in the qualitative evaluation of something.

Today, in pursuit of simple and arbitrary pleasures, I decided to stroll over to the local Panera to grab a late lunch and some free Wi-Fi action on their open-air patio. (Yes, these are the things in life that make me happy.) I consider myself to be fairly well-versed in Panera's offerings, as my co-worker and I usually patronize the one on Route 9 in Natick every Monday. I don't really need to look at the menu (except to determine whether a favorite seasonal offering has returned), I just usually blurt out one of three or four of their sandwiches that I like and get it with a bag of chips and a salad (occasionally tacking on a smoothie or an iced chai latte). The cashier hands me a pager, and five minutes later, I've got my food.

Unfortunately, that's not exactly an accurate description of the Panera experience that I had today. After ordering my food (turkey sandwich, chips, salad, and an iced chai latte) and receiving my pager, I sat down at a table and waited for the pager to buzz. After five minutes, I wandered over to the specialty drink counter (no latte yet), and then continued over to the food prep area to monitor the progress of my order.

This is where things started to get strange. There were two people (likely college or high school kids on hiatus) assigned to sandwich- and salad-making duty, but what they were actually doing was far less clear. (From what I could tell, it involved slowly walking in circles while occasionally commenting about someone named Roy.) Five other people (including an extremely pregnant woman, who I'll call Claire due to her striking resemblance to Emilie de Ravin) who had ordered before me were also standing and waiting, their faces awash with a mix of concern and irritation. At some point, one of them looked over and noticed everyone waiting, and doing his best to conceal an expression that can only be described as the Universal "Oh Shit" Face (which I hereby trademark, along with the acronym UOSF) and tore off a chain of three or four order tickets from a printer device.

Clearly, I wasn't getting my sandwich anytime soon, so I wandered back to the beverage counter. Still no iced chai lattes in sight, and a thorough scientific analysis of the situation led me to hypothesize that this was because no one was working at the station. Claire wandered over at some point, looking physically distressed, and perhaps this triggered someone to actually pay attention, because it wasn't ten seconds later that the young lad who'd taken my order -- visibly sporting a UOSF -- was asking us whether we were waiting for anything. Claire, who looked like she was in immense physical pain and holding back tears (I didn't know whether it was my place to ask her if she was okay, but I nearly did) indicated that she was waiting for a frozen lemonade, and I reminded him of my iced chai latte. The young man nodded, murmured some excuse about thinking that "someone else already helped you guys," and got to work.

Meanwhile, back at the food prep counter, there were several plates assembled with various sandwiches and salads, but since none of them looked like my order (at least not within a 95% confidence interval), and since my pager hadn't yet buzzed, I figured that none of them were mine. However, seeing as how the sandwich-makers had returned to their walking-in-circles-while-discussing-Roy routine, I stepped up to take a closer look. Sure enough, one of the order tickets matched mine, even though there was a baguette instead of chips, and even though they'd never rung my pager. After badgering one of the so-called employees to exchange the baguette for chips, I returned to the beverage counter.

"Here you go, buddy," said the drink-maker. It was a strawberry smoothie. "Sorry I forgot about your smoothie."

At this point, correcting him -- again -- seemed to be the ultimate exercise in futility, so I took the damn smoothie and left to eat.

As I ate, the simple thought Wow, this Panera sucks crossed my mind, as I'm sure happens to many of us at the conclusion of a similar experience. But then it occurred to me to ask: was that necessarily true? Is it really this particular Panera that sucks, or do all Paneras generally suck except for the one that I happen to patronize on a weekly basis? What if the abysmal customer-service experience that I had just been through was, in fact, closer to the norm than it was an exception to the rule?

When we evaluate an instance of a particular object or experience for the first time (whether it be dining at a Panera restaurant, playing whiffleball, or riding in a hot air balloon), I think we have a tendency to presume that the instance we're evaluating is perfectly average and falls in the middle of the bell curve of all possible instances of the same object/experience. From a statistical perspective, this seems like a reasonable presumption: 68% of your impressions will be of an "average" instance, and 95% of the time you'll be evaluating a "roughly average" instance. It also makes sense from the standpoint of natural selection: if, the first time your little brother Grrglmmick tried to jump onto a sleeping T-Rex he got eaten, it's reasonable to assume (for the purposes of preserving your gene pool) that Grrglmmick's experience is what "usually" happens when you try to jump onto a sleeping T-Rex.

And yet, thanks to the beauty of statistics, there will still be many cases in your life where your initial impression of something is actually one of those outliers that resides within 2.5% of either end of the bell-curve. (Recall the saga of Red Sox pitcher Clay Buchholz who, in his second major-league start, threw a no-hitter, and then proceeded to be one of the worst pitchers in all of baseball for the next half-year until he was sent back to the minors.) It is cases such as these that cause you to recognize and question your natural inclination to give greater weight to your initial impressions of something, and doing this can feel a little unsettling, perhaps even humbling, as though you're realizing that you've pulled off a doozy of a con-job on yourself.

But if you ask me, it's an acceptable consequence of living in a universe that, in spite of being doomed to an eventual heat-death at the hands of entropic degradation, takes a thankfully (and thanklessly) unpredictable path toward its final destination.