Show the ticket's age, not the clock
A kitchen screen that stamps 14:07 on a ticket reads as fourteen minutes to a cook mid-rush. Age with units — 47s, 11m, 2d — is the number the pass runs on.
Every ticket on a kitchen screen wears a number in its corner, and there are two schools of what it should be: the time the order was placed, or how long it has been waiting. We shipped the first and learned, from a screenshot of a live board, why it should be the second.
14:07 reads as fourteen minutes
Put "14:07" next to BEING MADE and a cook mid-rush reads a duration, not seven minutes past two. On the board that taught us this, tickets many hours old wore small, calm-looking numbers, and the operator's own words were that everything "just looks like twenty minutes". A clock time also forces mental subtraction — against the wall clock, per ticket, all service — to answer the only question the pass has: how long has this one been going?
Age, with its unit spelled out
So the badge now shows elapsed time and says its unit: 47s, then 6m 51s, then 11m, then 14h 7m, and past a day just 2d. Nothing is disguised — a ticket that has sat overnight looks exactly as wrong as it is, which is the point. The precision falls away as the number grows, because to the minute matters at eleven minutes and is noise at fourteen hours.
The promised time does not vanish; it moves to the ticket's detail view as "due 14:25", where somebody deciding whether to push an order back actually wants a clock time. Face of the ticket: how long. Behind a press: when. Different questions, different numbers, and mixing them up costs remakes.