So this weekend was one of the worst working months of my entire lengthy storied* career in the bar/restaurant sector of the service industry. Friday started innocently enough after a nice lunch and a lobster nap and a rolling-in-early for a change. Everything was simpatico, all greasy wheels and whale-snot slick, and there was even an early finish for This Guy. In bed by midnight and blissful slumber soon after with the help of some Mogwai. But roundabout two-thirty in the HEY!-M the kids roll in with heavy buzzes in tow, shouting my name from the foot of the stairs. This has become a trademark move in our humble household, one to which I am not averse. Especially when awakened from said blissful slumber by the pressing weight of female bodies and carefully placed neck and ear smooches. Makes getting up for bored games more than tolerable. So there were Apples and there were Apples and then there was even blissier slumber, and I roll out Saturday morning feeling peachykeen and ready to rock the heavy crowds.I should have known something was wrong when I'm sitting at the T-stop and my pocket starts buzzing. Never a good sign, especially just before a workday. There are three people on the planet who might call me at 11 AM on a Saturday, and none of it's usually good news. My place of bidness is the last of the three, if first in frequency. I ignore the ring without an ID-check because Hey, I'm on time and enjoying my book even in the frigid temps** and whatever they're gonna tell me can surely be rectified after the thirty minutes it'll take me to get to the Square. So I keep reading and the train comes and shuttles me quickly (for a change) and with expedience toward my destination across a frozen Charles through tunnel over track and I get off and walk out and down the street and then I see the fire trucks.
Five within two blocks, and I'm thinking What's the rumpus? Kess-kuh-say the hubbub, bub? as I'm walking upstairs and I open the door and am greeted by the sight of a dehumidifier the size of a Samoan dwarf working in our tiny office and high-output fans about the floor of the main room and a soggy splosh announcing every step I take. I'm greeted by our owner, fresh off a flight from Delhi, and our GM and they've been there since like two AM--awakened even earlier and powers-of-ten more rudely than I had been--and it seems our faulty little building in New England hasn't the heat it takes to keep the pipes from freezing when it's colder than a welldigger's ass. The sprinkler line, you see, had frozen and burst and showered ironically unfrozen water upon all that we hold sacred in our cozy little establishment. The bills were wet and the checks that pay the bills were wet and the walls were wet and the floor was soaked and even the paperclip holders were filled to overflowing and, most disheartening of that whole inventory of woe and difficulty, our computer and our point-of-sale server and our phone lines and our DSL and everything we run that separates us from your local Waffle House*** was hopelessly flooded and non-operational Until Further Notice.
The knot in my stomach was palpable, felt like an ostrich egg in a poodle's ass, because I knew what was happening: Come hell or (fuck it all) high water, we would open at some point that afternoon. And we would open flying blind, understaffed and unprepared for our forced reversion to that oldest and most dreaded restaurant technology:
Paper.
I'll digress for a moment: At the German gig on Bourbon Street, we worked strictly paper and dot-matrix roll-register. Every plastic transaction was a carbon-imprint for the first year I was there. It's entirely possible we were the last paper-based booze operation in the Southern 48 at the turn of the millennium, and it was a hassle. We got our plastic tips compiled only every six months, at Christmas (like it was a goddamned bonus) and at the beginning of June, when the slooooow months until Labor Day loomed like forgotten dogshit come the first thaw. It's a helluva sound, the shuh-CHUNK! of a handcranked credit card machine as it thunders in behind the bass saxophone of a Dixieland combo, off-tempo and (at least the former) entirely unnecessary in this modern era. But we did it and we took it because it was a pretty good gig, all things considered.That was a long time ago.
Since then I've worked non-computerized accounting systems, where whatever we've got in the register goes to the bank in the morning. Less, of course, the couple of hundred in change to get us through the next late night. But there was always a swipe machine that magically teleported one's electronic identity to and from a bank's server somewhere in Dubuque or Bangalore, returning with a hopeful approval for the requested loan to be granted us, the payee, by the bank, which would see to their loan's being remitted at some later date by the cardholder at a substantial rate of interest held over a longer term than the desired effects of any purchase made by said cardholder at our place of business. Where, incidentally, we pushed the last legal drugs accompanied by the sweet soulful strains of some seriously grooved entertainment.
My digression complete, let me reinforce that the prospect of working for an indeterminate period of time sans electronic communications in a high-traffic restaurant in a great location in a major American metropolis presented more than a few challenges. The first was procurement of manual credit-card slips. You know, the kind you only see anymore in gas stations in like Stumbleduck, West Dakota.**** Turns out that one wasn't that bad. The second was figuring out how to get messages to and from the tables to the servers to the kitchen (to the line and the tandoor and the foodrunners) to the bar and still get anything approaching the desired bill of fare to the table for which it was intended. The forms were easy enough to locate, as Staples is just downstairs and had reopened after the same flooding issues. So that's okay, but any practical implementation would mean schooling our FOH staff on-the-quick. Luckily they're rockstars and can hold their own despite the several language barriers in our tiny, borderless restaurant. As a bonus, we scored a hostess and a cashier before we opened at 5, so there was help if only for a few precious hours. All set, right?
And then we open, and then the people start trickling in, and then the trickle turns into the second flood we've seen that day and everybody's running and pretty soon it's like watching pit bulls carrying newborns on full heads of Kibbles 'n Meth. Half our kitchen is out on a catering gig, we've got like three new guys on the fireline, one of our dishwashers is drunk somewhere besides Dish for the umpteenth Saturday night in a row, our waitstaff are dealing with inordinately small tips based (one must assume) on the low-tech hindrances upon the timely receipt of food and checks and drinks and such--
--and I realize that none of this is very interesting to anyone who wasn't there and who hasn't worked in this sector of our nation's economy.
So a Nutshell Chronology: Two AM exit after three hours of hand-compiling checks and receipts and CC slips. Sleep (ish). Back again for a Sunday paper lunch, another pipe blows in the back of the building, no water or dishwasher or flushable toilets for two hours, Are We Gonna Close? Water back on, seating and serving for dinner and still working out the kinks from Saturday night. Another late night leaving. Fitful sleep, dreams of wrongs done past lovers mixed with standard Showing Up At Work Naked And Not Knowing Where Anything Is nightmares. Rolling in groggy and wiped for an unscheduled shift, a paper Monday at the start then (YIPPEE! SKIP!) wires fixed and server working but not until we put paper into 'puter. Day to dusk to dark, no fix that works, slammed and weeded and even have to serve (!) an 8-top. Rush dies down. Servers dance, laugh, have well-deserved pint. More paperwork, closed house, entering weekend’s work into system, Wu bangin' out speakers normally reserved for sitars and Hindi yelping, staring at computers and paper tickets from past three days and quickly going blind and numerically illiterate. Totals. Doublechecks. Triples. Forty bones off for the weekend, considering it a victory. Psyched, if hypercaffeinated. Deposit dropped, cab home to DOT, nip from The Good Scotch, too tired to sleep. Blog.
So here we are, and here I am, writing to you from the corner of Humbled and Exhausted. The latter is self-explanatory, but the former is truly a Statement. I saw (or was reminded) this weekend what a fragile relationship we have with technology anymore. In an age when nobody remembers phone numbers ("Screw it in the ear, I've got 'em in my cell!"), few know how to rock when all systems are not Go. It's a challenge to any of us brought up with Cable TV and Nintendo and Toaster Strudels. There were points this weekend when I wanted to quit my job, to walk out of a place that had been flooded--as far as I was concerned--back into the Fucking Stone Age, but something in me wanted to stick it out. I hate not knowing the ending***** to any story, even the most esoteric and inconsequential. I wanted to see how it all panned out, how we would fare when the river rose and the lights failed and the flints were struck while the youngins searched for dry tinder. Most of all, though, I found I craved the difficulty brought about by a dissolution of our feeble bond with modernity, however brief. Reminded me of the road, a feeling I miss far too often anymore. It was a waist-deep, sewer-stinking slog through waters curried with the spare and broken parts of everything since ENIAC, and it was a fucking trial. Sometimes pen and paper are all a man needs. There's no wi-fi in Shangri-La, after all, but nor are there any decent Indian joints.Bitch though it may have been, we done good. We done better than I would have figgered. That does not make any of it cool. Come the next localized Judgment Day, that next bus to Thunderdome will leave with me still sitting at the station, listening to my iPod, trying to text some other citified bedwetter about this great new ancient history exhibit I saw that centerpieced the Royal typewriter and the rotary phone and a weirdass musical number featuring an unidentifiable shuh-CHUNK! that may or may not have been totally post-techno.
*: Even if storied only unto myself and coworkers and the occasional roommate/girlfriend/vent-buddy/blog... But a brief sidenote to this footnote: There's sympathy and there's empathy and rarely the twain do meet, though everybody hates The Job at some point or another and the storying of such always leads to oneupsmanship in terms of shitty shitty days at the proverbial Office.
**: Which will soon matter more than they do while I wait in the wind and chill for the Inbound. Read on...
***: In terms of technology. Not to be taken as a disparaging remark on the quality or convenience or sheer waffley deliciousness of that Last Bastion Of The American Breakfast.
****: Gorgeous in March, especially during the annual Snipe Hunt.
*****: But I walked out of Basic Instinct 2 with neither curiosity nor regret. Not even about lopsided falsies.
