Ice Storm Insanity
My god, yesterday sucked a lot.
Thursday, we had an incredible ice storm. Sheets and sheets of freezing rain poured down out of steel gray skies, accompanied by thunder and brilliant blue lightening. It started in the early morning, and by the time I got up to let the dogs out, I had to kick the screen door to break the ice and get it open for them. It switched to sloppy snow for a bit in the afternoon, and then settled back into more freezing rain. Amazingly enough, all the guys made it to the game (they’re insane — I wouldn’t have driven in that shit), and the lights flickered all night, but didn’t go out. We were lucky.
I did end up wishing that I had brought my digital camera with me, though. It was gorgeous when I drove home Friday night. Every tree, plant, and bush was glazed in ice, and they looked like they were made of crystal. The fields of snow were frosted in a half-inch of ice, and sparkled under the lights. It looked like the whole town was made of diamonds and crystal. Beautiful. Wish I could have gotten pictures.
Friday morning, I woke to the phone ringing and ringing, and answered, only to be begged to come into work. It was 11:30am. I arrived at work four and a half hours early, driving through a mostly-darkened town, to find that we were one of the very few places open that day, and we were fucking packed out the doors. Out of all the sit-down, family-style restaurants in town, only two were open, and we were one of them. The Daily News headline that day read “11,000 Without Power”. The majority of our county, and all the surrounding counties, had no power. Most of the town was down. At one point, someone told me that there were only about three gas stations open in town, and one just outside of town that was running their pumps on a generator and doing everything else in the dark by hand.
Damn.
It was omifuckingawd busy. I mean, I have not seen busy like that, ever. We had an hour wait in the kitchen for food to come out. There were food tickets curled out of the printer all the way to the floor, and both boards (where the tickets are hung) were full. Every single seat in the house was cram packed full. It was screaming chaos. I arrived, and promptly called in my entire second shift staff. Those I couldn’t reach by phone were drafted when they came to pick up their checks. We had customers making their own coffee at the machines, and had set up impromtu “coffee stations” at each machine, so customers could just go get themselves cups of coffee as they came in. We had customers busing tables for us, mopping up messes for us, and one cleaned the women’s room for us. It was busy like you have never experienced before. By the time we did the till change-over at 3pm, (switching out the first-shift till for the second shift till), we had almost $3,000.00 in business, something like 500 customers, well over double what we normally do on a Friday morning.
When it was all said and done, the person who worked the shortest shift on my staff still had nine hours in that day (that was one of my cooks, who doesn’t have a phone and came in late to get his check), and most of us had done twelve or thirteen hours. Most of the staff had come in at least four hours early. We ran out of happy customer service around 6pm, and anyone who got lippy got what they deserved. I nearly rolled laughing when one table complained about one of my waitresses, Perky. They had gotten shitty with Perky when their food was taking too long, and Perky replied with “Do you see the other customers in here? We’re busy! There’s a buffet if you can’t wait!” They tried to complain to me, and I just laughed at them. At that point, we were in the process of doing yet another $500.00 hour. I told the lady, “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but we’re getting our butts kicked, and we’re doing our best. We’ve all been here since this morning, and we’re all tired.” She wanted a discount for having to wait so long (about 45 minutes, I think), and I told her, “Ma’am, everyone is waiting that long. We’re too busy. Sorry.”
It was fucking insane.
