It's one of the great social difficulties of our time. Now Google would like to offer (and own) an allegedly equitable solution.
It's easy to forget sometimes, but Google exists to make you happy.
In the pecking order, you do come slightly behind its own engineers, for whom many of its products are truly designed. But you're still in the company's thoughts somewhere.
Clearly, though, some of its engineers (and, by extrapolation, Google assumes you too) have been having difficulties in restaurants.
It's not so much that they've been leaving phone prototypes in them. It's that they've been going out for group dinners and then one or two Googlies have guzzled beyond the norm, leaving the splitting of the bill in an unbalanced state.
“Jason had 7 kir royales. Marina had 6 margaritas and Azielina must have knocked back 14 glasses of Sauvignon Blanc. So, um, dividing the total by, um, 7 and multiplying it by, oh, whatever, I'm drunk anyway.”
Days later, though, the person who feels they've paid too much of the whole feels wholly resentful.
This resentment has now been turned, as all resentments should, into a patent application. For Google has applied for a patent on restaurant bill splitting.
Immediately, I am thinking about people at dinner tables behaving exactly like restaurant staff, pushing at their screens after every order to ensure perfect justice.
My embodiment struggles with reading patent applications, as phrases such as “in one embodiment” keep on being repeated.
There will be those who marvel at this ingenuity. They will feel relief that finally justice will be done. Yet the system still seems to expect behaviour from others that is entirely unnatural. Which is what many of Google inventions often aspire to.
Moreover, please imagine clever technical types hacking the system, so that they secure free trips to Cancun, financed by their alleged friends.
I tend to think of the splitting-the-bill problem a little differently.
Like golf, it is one of those life experiences that tend to show the true character of your friends. Those who have a sense of justice and decency go out of their way to ensure that they haven't taken advantage.
The moochers simply mooch. Once they do, you make sure you don't go out in a group with them again.
Isn't that approach a little simpler? Or am I just not scientific enough?