The restaurant had its name on the bill but no telephone number. Presumably, this done to stop or reduce telephone complaints direct to the restaurant. Seems that everything must be done online.
I was a very slow adopter of Uber rides many years ago. When talking to some evangelist at that time offering me codes for free rides, one of the reasons I gave for not using Uber at that time, was that it was completely dependent on smartphone apps, therefore being unusable to certain portions of the population (old non-technical people, those who lost their phone, those who use an OS other than Android or iOS, dead battery and no charging cable, etc.). I foresaw that should it outcompete traditional services to the point of bankruptcy, those people would be left unserviced. I proposed having a web UI and a phone line.
It is sad to see that prediction coming true in various fields. This strong bias against having customer service people, against customers having any way to talk to a person, is noxious to society at large.
I guess in the same line of thought, I find the abandonment of the public phone system to be sad. Instead of replacing old phones with newer terminals with internet capabilities, we abandoned the entire system. Therefore making the world a bit more unequal and a bit more dependent on personal devices.
Related anecdote: last time my smartphone battery died and i had to make a phone call, i walked into the nearest café just like i did many years back, and asked to borrow their phone. They were very suspicious and unfriendly, to say the least, despite having ordered a cup of coffee first. This was a very normal practice not long ago...
>therefore being unusable to certain portions of the population (old non-technical people, those who lost their phone, those who use an OS other than Android or iOS, dead battery and no charging cable, etc.)
FWIW uber has had a web app for years now, and before that there were a plenty of unofficial clients. I remember calling Ubers from my laptop in 2016.
