You’ve heard this before. “Sir, table will be ready in 5 minutes.” You smile. You wait. 10 minutes. 20 minutes. 45 minutes later… Host says: Almost ready. Still almost ready. 💀 So I turned this into a coding challenge. And surprisingly… This is a real system design problem. 🍽️ The Problem The logic looks simple: Add guests to a waitlist Assign tables Update status Done. Seems straightforward. But real restaurants are chaos. ⚠️ What Goes Wrong? In real systems: • Tables take longer than expected • Guests stay longer than predicted • Wait estimates become wrong • Queue order may not be fair • Some people feel stuck forever And suddenly: 👉 “5 minute wait” becomes 50 minutes. Sound familiar? 😅 🧠 What I Observed When exploring this problem: Basic solutions track a queue Many ignore changing table availability Some miss fairness problems Very few handle dynamic wait predictions The code works. But the experience lies. 🔍 The Real Issue This is not just queue logic.…