Tying up Loose Ends

I should probably tie up the loose ends from the Tillamook Event entry on which I promised to write more. Truth is, I’ve put some distance between myself and the worst parts of that weekend and I am loathe to revisit them. But, here…I’ll hold the thing at arm’s length, hold my nose and describe the highlights (lowlights?):

The oven fired on about three cylinders all weekend. Which turned out to be a non-issue, since business SUCKED badly enough for a half-functional oven to keep us adequately supplied with product. I had to bump heads with the snotty, overbearing Iron Chef Wannabe in command of the Event Center kitchen a couple of times when I needed to use the facility’s beautiful, clean, brand-new and largely unused convection oven to back up my lame one. What is it about men in kitchens that they have to radiate testosterone??

About halfway through the day on Saturday, husband relates to me that there is "drama" going on back at the café. Seems flaky cook (who has been a surprising non-source of drama since her rehiring last October) has had a major upheaval in her life and has decided to pack up and move back to the Midwest. Tomorrow. Husband reacts to this crisis by getting in the car and going supply shopping. I spend the next several hours coaching husband on flaky-employee relations, over a hit-and-miss cel phone connection. And developing an ulcer.

Sunday, more of the same sucky business (sales were down almost 50% for the weekend.) The highlights of that day were that we packed everything up without hurting ourselves, and it wasn’t snowing in the pass on the way home. My mind was mostly on Monday, when I would have to deal with flaky cook’s newest drama. In reality, Monday became a case of crap being piled on top of crap, when my back-up cook also "drama-ed" out on me, leaving me to work a double shift to follow up my working non-vacation over the weekend. In my physically and emotionally weakened state, it looked to me like the whole house of cards was crumbling again, and I was going to be left to run the whole damn restaurant by myself.
Again. One step forward, ten steps back—and into a ten-foot-deep pile of bullshit.

So there you have it. Sorry I couldn’t go into more detail, but I really didn’t want to get close enough to see the minutiae. The drama cleared up relatively rapidly, after some frank talks with a couple of valued but slightly unreliable employees. And I had another huge weekend coming at me at 100 miles an hour—Easter weekend with our commitment to sell hot dogs at the County Easter Egg Hunt on Saturday, and our first annual Old Town Cafe Easter Sunday Brunch to scrape together. By Sunday night I was so tired, I was in tears. Mostly happy tears, because Easter weekend went as well as the previous weekend had gone badly. Ah, yes…there’s that see-saw thing going on again.

The holes in the hull of Good Ship OTC have been patched, at least temporarily. I won’t delude myself into thinking that the patches can’t cave in at any moment, with no warning…I learned that much from the experiences of the past week. I’m left wondering how exactly to protect myself from the potential damage of these h/r torpedoes. And I haven’t quite come up with a solution. For now, we’re sailing on…not quite smoothly, into slightly choppy waters. But at least we're on the water, and not under it...

Tags: small business