One of Those Nights

Last night was one of those busy-out-of-effing-nowhere types of evenings at work.  The sort of night where a bus of thirty people shows up when nearly every table in the restaurant is already full without calling ahead.  The sort of night when my bar printer was spitting out tickets with reckless abandon.  It was one of random Saturday's that was like two Saturday's combined.

CREDIT.

Naturally all this happened when were horribly understaffed.  Just to make it interesting.  According to the schedule we were meant to have six girls on the floor and me behind the bar.  While even with everyone we all would have been busy, it would have at least been manageable.  Instead we had two girls call in sick and one who had been suspended for a drunken streaking incident (seriously).  Three girls on the floor and one bartender is what we were left with.  That's Monday night staffing, not Saturday.  We were screwed before we even started.

Eventually, when the weeds started to thicken, Manager finally decided to make the call to try and find someone to save our asses.  Of course everyone seemed to be screening phone calls because that's just what you do on a Saturday night.  Finally, Ariel agreed to come in even though she'd worked all day.  That, my friends, is dedication.

If Ariel hadn't come in our ship would have sunk faster than the freaking Titanic.  Luckily our ship just took on a lot of water and was able to limp to port without any casualties.  Yes, it sucked.  Yes, it was hard.  But our karma must have been awesome because everyone was pretty chill about it.  Guests actually realized that the restaurant was full and had some patience.  That shit is rare.

So even though we had the same number of staff in the kitchen as we had on the floor, we made it through.  My feet hurt, my back ached and my head throbbed.  But I had the best medicine of all - money.  When I took that cash out of my tip pitcher it was all more than worth it.  A busy, 40% night treated me more than well.  You read that right, 40%.  That shit is more rare than patient people.

As much as last night sucked - especially when that thirty top drink ticket came up - it ended up being totally awesome.  It's nice to have those shifts where your extreme hard work is actually rewarded now and again.

I'm sure I'll be back to bitching about shitty people tomorrow.


P.S.  I also forgot to mention that a table left a phone number on a plate made completely out of ranch dressing.  Seriously.  I have to admit that that shit is actually fairly impressive.  It's not like we have squirt bottles of ranch to making writing easy.  He had to used a cup of ranch as if it was paint.  Congratulations for having the most impressive pickup attempt to date.  And that's in over two and half years.

I was going to attempt to grab the plate so I could snap a quick picture, but the rush made it impossible.  Just know that it was epic.  He even fit the area code in there.  It still blows my mind.