I don’t think I really knew the meaning of multi-tasking until I became a waitress for the first time. I soon learned that unless I had items in both hands at all times, I was doing something wrong. I had to constantly think about what each table needed because I soon found it impossible to remember it all at once. The central-resource theory of attention helped explain this because it says we have a central reserve of resources for which all activities compete. Between filling drinks, delivering food, clearing plates and all the little jobs in between, the numerous activities competing for my attention outweighed my capacity to respond to them at once. This cartoon accurately describes how I felt trying to handle all of these demands at once. Inevitably, there were some requests that got pushed outside my capacity and I would simply forget them. This especially applied as I would walk back from taking a tables’ order to the kitchen. While I was trying to remember everything for that table, I would have at least 2 or 3 others tables stop me and ask for something else. Quickly, I reached my attention capacity and by the time I made it to the kitchen, I knew there was some request that I was forgetting but I could not remember what. I was also very nervous my first few weeks on the job. Kahneman’s central resource model of attention says that arousal is a determinant of the available capacity of your resource pool. Therefore, my high stress and nervousness caused increased arousal and further reduced the attention capacity in my resource pool. This only made it harder to remember everything and forgetting items for guests made my stress level increase more. It created a viscous cycle.