08/22/2026
When a One-Digit Bug Walks Into a Restaurant…
I was standing at the entrance of Mylapore Sunnyvale when two gentlemen approached me.
“How long for a table?”
“About 40 minutes. Could be sooner if we have cancellations. Please join the waitlist.”
Pretty routine.
Then tables started turning faster than expected. People were leaving, I was messaging waiting guests, and we were seating parties fairly quickly.
A little later, the gentleman came back.
“What happened to my waitlist?”
I checked.
His name wasn’t there.
I checked the history.
According to the system, he had removed himself from the waitlist.
“Sir, it looks like you removed your name.”
“I did NOT remove my name.”
Uh-oh.
He was understandably annoyed. He hadn’t received a confirmation. He hadn’t received a table-ready message. And now the system was claiming he had removed himself.
For a few minutes, we had the classic Silicon Valley situation:
Customer blamed the software.
Software blamed the customer.
And the guy standing at the restaurant entrance—you guessed it, me—became tech support. 😂
Then something occurred to me.
“Can you tell me the phone number you entered?”
We compared it.
One digit was wrong.
Mystery solved.
The confirmation text had gone to a complete stranger.
The “Your table is ready” message also went to that stranger.
And the stranger, probably wondering why someone wanted to feed him dosai, did the perfectly logical thing:
He removed himself from the waitlist.
Except, of course, he wasn’t removing himself. He was removing our actual customer.
One wrong digit had created three realities:
The customer thought we had forgotten him.
The restaurant thought the customer had cancelled.
And somewhere in Silicon Valley, an innocent person was wondering why Mylapore kept trying to give him a table.
😂
We seated the gentleman, but the incident stayed with me.
I escalated it to the Yelp team with a simple suggestion:
When a phone number is the primary identity and communication mechanism, shouldn’t we verify it before trusting it?
Enter phone number.
Re-enter phone number.
If they don’t match, stop.
Not exactly cutting-edge AI.
But sometimes the best technology improvement isn’t adding another sophisticated feature.
It’s anticipating the very ordinary ways human beings make mistakes.
Good UX isn’t just about making the happy path easier. It’s about making the human-error path less painful.
And occasionally, the best place to discover a software bug isn’t in a conference room, a dashboard, or a usability lab.
It’s standing at the entrance of a busy restaurant on a weekend. 😄
