Screaming

Apologies ahead of time, but I need to vent for a bit. A great deal isn’t really going my way right now and screaming it out into the cyber world might be better than screaming it at some random passer by on the street.

A lot of stuff isn’t going my way right now. You know, the usual; bills to pay when you really don’t even have enough money to eat; a mounting wave of incoming financial obligations with no real idea of how you’re going to deal with them; exhaustion and a complete lack of interest in reading, writing and other intellectual pursuits; a university education that’s going to take a huge amount of time that I don’t really have; a job that’s so tiring that I don’t have the energy to search for another one and to top it all off a place where I’m starting to enjoy working less and less.

It’s that last one that I’m going to talk about. More specifically it’s the last one yesterday that I’m going to talk about. Yesterday was probably the worst day that I’ve had at my job.

It was gay parade in Amsterdam. That meant that the city was flooded – not just with gays, but also with tourists who wanted to go and see the gays break loose. Of course, this meant that it was incredibly busy. That’s nothing new, though. Busy we can deal with. Unfortunately not just was it busy, but nothing seemed to work.

It started with the computer system. We use these mobiles to take orders on the terrace. Unfortunately, we’ve only got one left (after two died horrible deaths in the last couple of days). This means the main responsibility for taking the orders falls on one person. The first person to take this role was lax. When the second person took over and walked out onto the terrace they were basically attacked by mobs of coffee desiring, apple pie demanding and hot-chocolate craving customers.

I was standing bar and trying to give these people what they wanted, but there were no coffee cups (the washer didn’t think it was necessary to pick up his pace). Then there was no apple pie because the kitchen didn’t think it was necessary to listen to my insistent beeping on the intercom. Then I had apple pie, but no whipped cream (because the canisters hadn’t been sent down to be refilled) and of course everybody wanted whipped cream.

Apparently the customers all took it in good stride – but I certainly didn’t.

And then there was dinner. Already frazzled from the afternoon of madness we went into dinner hoping that things would be better. We got to close the terrace because of rain (bad for business but good for overworked staff) and run the insides as a restaurant. All was going well until suddenly food stopped coming up. Thirty minutes passed and customers started looking at us expectantly. Suddenly I remembered the pink stripes that had come up on the food order tickets that had last been sent up.

They weren’t that stupid, were they? Downstairs I went to ask if they had replaced the paper roll in the printer, seeing as those pink stripes meant the paper was nearly out. ‘You need to replace the paper rolls?’

Fucking idiots.

It’s a Saturday night, prime time, during a festival and they don’t even think ‘hey, we haven’t had orders for quite a while, maybe something is wrong’.

We rewrite out the tickets, by hand and get them back to work – then we go out to the floor and offer all the affected tables drinks on the house. The peace is restored. New tables walk in and take orders.

These new orders come up before some of the old hand written orders are finished! These people get their food in ten minutes, while the table next to them has been waiting for an hour. How, pray tell, do you explain that?

I told the rest of the staff that if something like this happens again I’m running away screaming. I’m not sure if I was serious.