Down to the Salad

...and some garlic bread and mozzarella sticks, too.

Last night at work was CRAZY. It was utter insanity washed down with a shot of futility, with a hopeless chaser. We just couldn't make pizzas fast enough. We couldn't make dough fast enough to compensate for the business.
Here's a quick explanation of the situation's beginning:
Pizza Hut has a special going right now where you can get any size pizza, any number of toppings, for $10. The commercial is lying about any crusts, the stuffed pizzas are a dollar extra. This, as you can imagine, is a really popular pizza. In some cases, it has knocked as much as eight to ten dollars off the regular price of some orders.
It is ridiculous, and all the employees hate it.
Well, on a normal Friday night we start making more dough when we're down to 30 of whatever it is we're selling a lot of. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour for new dough to be ready to cook with, and that gives us a few extra minutes in between the last pizza sold and the new ones ready to use. Last night, we started making dough with 50 larges left.
We were out of those in half an hour.
And bread sticks.
And then we ran out of stuffed crusts and large hand-tossed.
And then medium hand-tossed.
Followed by medium pans.
And then large thin crusts.
All we had left to sell by 7:00 PM was medium thin crust pizzas. It would be an hour before anything else was ready. People were still placing orders, knowing full well it would be up to an hour and a half for them to get their pizza. In the dining room, things were going badly since we had to start telling people at the door that we were out of just about everything. Our dine-in crowd was pretty small that night, too, partly because of the game, and partly just because. And then we stopped having food to sell to them, and it got smaller.
It got to the point where Matt the Manager took our phones off the hooks and told us not to answer them if they rang. We took 145 orders in an hour and a half. Three people cooking, four waitresses, and one person cutting the food from two ovens, and we were just overflowing with business. We'd made three grand by 7:30. That's a lot.

I left around 8:45 after staying for a while to make sure that everyone had everything they needed for the rest of the night (I was only supposed to work 12-8). I folded boxes, helped with dishes, cut pizzas for a while, and manned the phones when no one else wanted to be the one that said, "Sorry, all we have left are thin crust medium pizzas. It's going to be about another half an hour before anything else is ready. Yes, that includes personal pan pizzas. No, we're out of stuffed crusts. All we have left right now are medium thin crust pizzas. I'm sorry about that."

Patrick picked me up, whisked me off home, and cooked me dinner. We watched some stand-up comedy until I started to fall asleep, and then we went to bed and I passed out.

I am SO glad I have off today.