broke down
i feel about as broke down as this supra. can you believe someone would try and sell this piece of junk? i was laughing so hard i had to double back and photograph it. this could be my favorite photo of all time. but i must say, i feel as broke down as this old car. last saturday i told you the story of our troubles at work, and then the gators lost too. if i was the urban meyer of my team, i felt defeat last week just like he did. well tonight i felt defeat again, an even harder blow than last week, just as tonight the gators got beat for the second week in a row.
we were going along as usual until about 7:30. then the orders kept coming in. the to-go orders were stacking up even though jake was giving over an hour times. and we all thought the in house orders would start to dwindle as the game got closer. they didn’t. they came is as fast and furious as always. so now we’ve got 20 or so to-go orders, and just as many in house orders, and two ovens. the ovens are full of new pizzas, and we’re waiting with pies to go in. when i started seeing in house orders that had been up for 30 minutes and we still didn’t have them in the oven, i knew it was a bad scene. especially since there were tickets lined up and the oven was full and the pies were all still uncooked. it wasn’t long before we were making pies for people in house that had been waiting 40 minutes, and we were just making the pies. i cannot remember the last time that happened. i thought that kind of thing couldn’t happen to us anymore. i thought we were better than that. and it’s hard to say exactily what went wrong. obviously, to go orders is what was the problem. we should have been giving 2 hour times when we were giving one hour times… but i don’t know if that would have solved our problems… i’ve never seen it so bad. folks in house waited up to an hour and 15 minutes for their food after ordering it. to go orders were all runnning 15 minutes late. the pies were not cooked as perfectly as i would have liked. some were undercooked but had to go. some were too dark but it was too late to correct those. i had the oven on full blast and that cooked things differently than usual, but i had no choice. we had more orders on the board than i’ve ever seen. tickets would each have 3 and 4 pizzas on them. there would be 4 calzones on one ticket, or 3 pizzas on several tickets. tickets like these take up half an oven. and that is only one of 30 or more tickets to be made… we crashed, we burned, we lost.
of course, the gators didn’t get quite as humiliated. they made a great show and only lost in the last minutes again. they showed what a top caliber team they are but in the end it is another loss, no matter how good they showed. and tonight i’m sure we lost customers. the food took too long. every other table was asking how long for their food. people picking up to go food were crowding the hallway waiting, after calling in over an hour previous. and in the kitchen, we did all we could. we gave it everything we had, but we just didn’t have what it took to knock it out. it knocked me out tonight. i have a whole weekend now to think about what went wrong and how we can do better next time. the key has to be in those to go times. folks will just have to learn to call in two hours before a game if they want a pie from us.
usually it’s the night before a home game that slaughters us, and even then, we usually handle it with only a few pies going out at 45 minutes or maybe a couple at 50 minutes. tonight we must have sent out 10 or more pies at over an hour. embarrassing. humiliating. defeat.
so pizza fans that suffered tonight, please forgive us. it wasn’t for lack of effort, but lack of experience. i would think that after 4 1/2 years doing this, not much could surprise us, but we still lose a game now and then. i am about as wiped out as a man can be. exhausted. overwhelmed. defeated. hopefully, my personal projects don’t kill me over the weekend and tuesday i can start all over.
remember, you can be the best and still get beat.
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