I'm sick and tired of always being sick and tired

So it's been kind of a crazy week. I'll start by talking about work, and see how far I get. This week has been... interesting, to say the least. Closed Monday night, nothing special or odd there. Was "off" Tuesday, but I had to go to a meeting with Eileen in Gina's place. Felicia was supposed to go as well, but she had a flat, so she didn't make it. We went over to Murphy's Deli, it was alright. Got back, hung out with Shelly for a while, since I was bored. And, well, Sara was there, and I like hanging out with her. Lesbian or not, she's cool. And purty. So yeah.

Anyway, hung out there for a while. Little later, turned out they were about to run out of wings, so I drove up to Seguin to pick some up. Came home eventually, David and I watched some B5. We're getting pretty close to the end.

Wednesday is when things started to get interesting. That was when I opened for the first time, with Jess to teach me what the hell I was doing. Mal was my opening driver. Things started off kind of badly - I was about twenty minutes late. Didn't miss too much - stocking the makeline, that kinda stuff. She gave me a bit of crap when I walked in, but I deserved it. Things went really smoothly after that.

Well, for a while.

Jess took off 'bout 2 or so. Apparently, she was supposed to stay 'til about 6 or so. If she had, the complete and total disaster that happened would have been at least somewhat mitigated. It stayed slow 'til about 4. That's when all hell broke loose. The phones all started ringing. We'd often have five and six lines on hold at a time - no exaggeration. Mal was the only driver at first, and Lilie came in at 5. That was it until six, when we got two more, and seven, when two more were supposed to come in. Sergio and Patrick came in at 5, which didn't really help, 'cause that's when things started getting really hairy. Patrick was on phones for the most part, with Sergio switching between the oven and makeline, and I was on dough slapping. We eventually switched, so he was in the corner, not that that really helped anything. Things kept coming in faster than we could get them out. We started being like forty/fifty pies down, with a thirty minute load time. Yeah, it was bad. Sergio called in Joe, and Mal ended up calling Gina, who then came in about 6 or 6:30. She wasn't nearly as upset as she could have been. She seemed very relaxed, mainly interested in fixing the situation over assigning blame.

We got things under control fairly quickly. It helped that Mike got here fairly soon, and Joe was there as well. That, and things slowed down very quickly. It was really embarrasing, 'cause I started crying. It wasn't because it was a stressful rush, or that things had gone bad, it was that people were counting on me to have things ready for them, and I failed them. That my decisions were going to screw someone else over. It's hard to explain and put into words. Gina talked to me for a while, then left. I left fairly soon after that, after making a deposit.

Was supposed to be off on Thursday, but I ended up going in to cover Rose's shift, who decided to be pretty immature about things and just not show up. That shift was fairly uneventful.

Opened on Friday, got busy, but overall, fairly uneventful. Saturday, now, Saturday was crazy. We had the UT game, the SWT game televised on ESPN2, plus it was a Saturday. It was busy all day. Sunday wasn't too dissimiliar. So yeah, it was a fairly hectic week. I was even supposed to stay late on Sunday to cover Rose and Theresa's shifts, but I got to go home about 6:30, since it wasn't too bad.

Overall, well, yeah. Not quite sure what to say about all that. Ended up with something like 55 hours for the week. I'm opening twice this week, closing twice, and one short shift. I've dealt with some of the best and worst customers that really exemplify things I like and don't like about them this week. That sentence was really awkward, and I apologize. But:

So, Tuesday was my day off, so I hung out with Shelly for a while (after the manager meeting with Eileen). A call comes in, so I took it, since Shelly was busy. It was a lady complaining that she got a cold pizza last night, and she wanted it replaced. Now, I've been in the food service industry for almost five years now, and I've been dealing with customers for almost the entire time. For the most part, I don't take it personally, and I *hate* screwing up customer orders. And when I do screw something up, I'm more than happy to correct the mistake.

That being said, it's hard for us to give someone a cold pizza. I don't mean because we're so awesome and never screw up, but because there are a *lot* of things that would have to happen for someone to get a cold pizza. First and foremost, those pizzas are *hot* when they come out of the oven. When we make a crew pie, we often have to let it set for a good ten minutes before it's anywhere near cool enough to eat it, and even then, we're blowing on it and sucking air into our mouths while we chew. That's with it not under the heat rack, mind you, which is the second thing. Then we have the heat bags, which were designed and patented for Domini's to keep the suckers warm. So I was a little curious about her complaint. If a pizza was delivered cold, I want to know why. The phone number she was calling from didn't have any orders placed from it, so I asked her for the number the order was placed from. She said it was from a friend's cell phone, and I asked for that number. She gave me that number. There was one order placed from it... a month and a half ago.

I think she was starting to get worried or something, because she told me she had the boxes here if we wanted them. I then asked her for the address the order went to, and she told me that and about what time it went there. I pulled up the daily order register from the night before, and sure enough, no orders had gone to that address around that time. Or at all the entire day. Or anywhere on that street the entire day. I told her I couldn't find her order, and we would need the boxes from the order that she told us she had. She then launched off on something about how they were in the trash can, and she sure as hell wasn't going to go digging through the trash for them, but our driver was welcome to. I was ready to terminate it right there, since she had initially offered them as proof, but then reneged when I asked for them. When there's that many suspicious factors all piled on top of each other, yeah. It was Shelly's shift, though, so I ended up sending out the pizza.

Then, this... (censored) has the unmitigated gall to call back EIGHT MINUTES later, yelling at Shelly, where the fuck her order was and why it wasn't there, claiming she had called forty-five minutes ago. She then called again at the half hour mark.

Had a similar incident the next day, when a lady said she had ordered a pizza the day before, and that it was undercooked. Same scenario - our oven has a tendency to overcook, if anything. She said she didn't call back 'cause it was too late. During the course of the conversation, she changed what it was she ordered, couldn't tell me where she ordered from, etc. That, and when I explained I couldn't help her at all, she just accepted it very meekly, instead of getting infuriated, as a real mistake would.

Now, should I feel proud about catching these? Nope. In the grand scheme of things, do they matter? Nope. I know that. While I'm on the subject... on Sunday, when things got pretty bad, we were warning people up front that the delivery time was an hour to an hour and a half. So of course, people called at an hour about their order. Now, I'll agree, an hour is certainly a long time to have to wait for your order. But when you were warned up front and had every chance to decline to order, I find it a little unreasonable to complain.

Not that all of my experiences lately have been negative. On Wednesday, when all hell was breaking loose, the carryout times started to get a little long. I'm talking 30 - 45 minutes. And people were fine with it. I suspect part of that was that they were right there, could see how incredibly busy we were, and that we were doing everything we could to get stuff out as fast as possible. We also ran out of wings; we only had to tell one person that had already ordered that we were out; he was pretty cool with it, and we gave him some chicken kickers instead (and took them off the ticket).

And that's enough of that.

Anastacia -- Sick and Tired