She could do about eleven minutes on her feet.

That was the real constraint and it never improved much in the first year.

So the job was largely routing: knowing where every seat in a room was, knowing which door put her nine steps from her chair instead of thirty, knowing that a receiving line is death and a seated greeting is fine, and building the day so that she was never standing for more than about nine minutes without a place to stop.

I got very good at it.