The number the chef acts on was the smallest thing on the screen

A kitchen screen has two numbers on it that look similar and are not. One is the wait you are quoting the person at the counter. The other is how many tickets are still to be made.

Ours showed the first at 34 pixels and the second at 13, in grey, after a dot, as a caption on the first. On a narrow phone it did not show the second at all — the row ran out of room and that was the thing it gave up.

The wait matters to whoever is quoting it. The jobs count is the one the person cooking acts on. It was the smaller of the two everywhere, and missing on exactly the screens with the least room.

Two numbers, not one number with a footnote

The count is now a figure in its own right: same size, same weight, same tabular digits, and read first. The wait sits beside it. Nothing else on that row is allowed to push either off the edge — the tools fold behind a button before a live number gives up a digit.

Making room cost something, and it is worth saying what. On a narrow phone the word "wait" now goes before the filter's words do. A wait reading "20m" beside a jobs count is not ambiguous; a filter reduced to an icon has genuinely lost information about which orders you are looking at. So the word goes first and the filter keeps its label longer.

What it counts, and what it does not

A ticket that is cooked and waiting for a customer to come and collect it is not a job. It is on a shelf, not in somebody's hands. The count uses the same rule the wait quote uses, which means the two can never tell different stories — and on a real board it read 4 beside a filter row saying All 5 · Being made 4 · Waiting for customer 1.

That agreement is the point. Two numbers on one screen worked out two different ways is worse than one number, because now somebody has to decide which to believe.

The measurement that was wrong about itself

The bar works out what it can fit by adding up the width of everything on it. Doing that revealed an error nobody had noticed: the connection indicator was priced at 11 pixels, which is what it costs on a phone, where only the dot shows. On a tablet on a wall it also shows the word LIVE and costs 57. Forty-six pixels charged to nobody, on exactly the screens where the arithmetic still has decisions to make.

It had been hiding inside a comfortable margin for months. Adding one more chip narrowed the margin enough to expose it. That is usually how these go.