It's Memorial Day, one of the biggest BBQ days of the year, and here I am sitting at home with the last thing on my mind being BBQ. But a day off is a day off!
I know I regularly share the good, but it's only fair to also share the bad and the ugly. This week had a lot of both.
I wake up Friday morning to what sounds like SWAT trying to get into the house. I stumble to the door and find one of my managers and a cook freaking out a bit saying there's an emergency at the restaurant. Something about the smoker being down, no meat, etc. So I frantically get my **** together and rush up there.
Sure enough, the SP is down. The igniter or a relay or something went out sometime in the middle of the night. Smoker was cold, so it must have gone out early on. So first off, nearly 300 pounds of brisket and pork are a complete loss. Can't open for lunch for sure.
Get my repair guy over and he identifies the parts needed to fix it. Great! Oh, problem is they are in Ft. Wayne and due to the holiday weekend, earliest they could get delivered would be Tuesday unless I drive all the way there and pick them up myself. Dammit!
Usually we could salvage something out of this and fire up shirley, load it up with meat, and rock dinner service. But nope. Shirley was already fired up and 100% full of meat just to satisfy all of the catering orders on Saturday. Double dammit! That means the only option is to close the restaurant for an entire Friday, one of the busiest days of the week. Not to mention the hundreds and hundreds of dollars in wasted meat.
So I keep one guy behind to run Shirley for the day and I have to bust my hump and drive to Ft. Wayne and back to get the parts and then coordinate the repair that evening with the repair guy so we could have everything up and running in time to load that smoker up to get the meat going for what was needed in the house on Saturday. Nightmare.
Between the $700 in parts and repairs, hundreds lost in meat, $3k lost in sales, overtime to pay a cook to run the shirley pit until 3am, it's was like flushing $5,000 down the toilet. To make things worse, it was a payday, and all that loss is going to put payroll in jeopardy as checks try to start clearing tomorrow.
Oh, and more plumbing problems as the pump broke down for the soda/ice machine and flooded the kitchen. Not wanting to spend hundreds of dollars on a plumber, I got to play plumber and fix it all myself. With all of the aggravation, I probably didn't really save anything, but oh well.
Just a friendly reminder that even when things are going seemingly well, it can all go to hell in the blink of an eye. A blunt reminder of just how difficult and stressful this business can be.