Huh. That's not what I meant. What I meant was that the process was intended to flow through a particular sequence, and that I made it flow through a different and unintended sequence. In a sense I stopped it from working as it was intended, so in a sense I "broke" it.
I don't know how else to say that, and certainly I didn't intend to imply what you seem to have inferred.
It is because you as the author can't see how it looks from the outside. There is a smugness[1], and a characterization of the staff as cogs in a machine that you were able to manipulate like cogs in your experiment.
How did you "stop it from working"? You even admit "they didn't mind".
If anything, what you really showed is that your analogy, while interesting and amusing, has limited accuracy. The concept of a state machines is precisely that, about machines. Not humans. The human staff took notice of the unexpected flow, externally manifest their on-the-fly adaptive mental processing of it on their faces, and then adapted. The restaurant didn't devolve into chaos.
The staff didn't freeze and lie down on the floor like driverless cars are doing on the streets[2]. The fact that automation of anything complex and unpredictable as driving isn't built on anything even vaguely akin to a state machine is telling. That would lead to disaster.
In other words, you didn't break anything at all. It was your analogy that got broken.
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[1]: You display this smugness even in your reply, "Language is weird. <fx: shrug />". Just sayin. As an writer who posted his work on HN himself looking for feedback should humbly listen to negative reactions as much as if not more so than seek to bask in admiration and success.
I also felt the last part comes off as smug and also clickbait-y. Techie tries to prove that they're smarter than restaurant workers by 'breaking' their system.
> It was apparent on the faces of the staff that this was most unexpected ... members of the public weren't supposed to know how the system worked ... how could I possibly have known ?!?
Implies that you know more (about the system) than the public. The problem is you are assuming you know why the waiters were shocked. You also don't need the last sentence, it's implied by the first two. Here's an alternative version:
> it seemed like the waiters were shocked. I'd wager that the general public wasn't supposed to know how the system worked
Editing something in the middle of a discussion about it seems counterproductive to me. Now that I have read this comment I am uncertain whether my own other comment makes sense.
At least leave the original in place but struck out.
Leaving the original in place but struck out is really hard on the platform I'm using. Possible, but non-trivial, and it seemed better simply to "fix" it for anyone reading it later. If it was mis-leading then I wanted to fix it. I do, by the way, agree that it might be a difference between cultures. Some things don't translate and come across differently.
For reference, at the end the original read:
It was apparent on the faces of the staff that this was most unexpected ... members of the public weren't supposed to know how the system worked ... how could I possibly have known ?!?
But it was a real-life example of a finite-state machine, beautifully designed, and extremely effective.
Until I did something unexpected, of course. But they didn't seem to mind too much.
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Edit: I wish people didn't down-vote you, I think your comment is perfectly reasonable.
My joke with the scripted humans is to rush the process: When they come to ask if everything is okay you answer the question before they ask it "everything is okay!" and hand them the table number. They usually find it amusing.
