Friday, busy, Saturday, Crazy.
We're fully booked, with flips, nothing fixed but we're hoping that customers leave in an hour so that others can be sat.
We're not the sort of restaurant where you plan to be in and out within an hour or two.
I've brought in pedometers for all the staff, want to track how many steps each of them take each night, it's lighthearted but I'm aiming to prove that some are definitely a lot less valuable than others.
The new waiter, M I'll call him, he really doesn't need a pedometer, he needs a odometer for the wheelchair that J pushes him about in, but in the interests of not offending anyone (or offending everyone equally) I've gotten him one as well.
They take it in good stride, figure out how they work, attach them to their belts or waistbands, and the night begins.
***
The night, it goes off pretty much as expected, it's crazy busy, the staff - mostly support apart from G, disappear the moment things get busy, reappear a couple of hours later when it's cooled a bit. We have the demon table from hell, a regular who's family is in from Montreal to wish him happy-important-birthday, they've imposed all sorts of financial restraints on the party, in the end 24 people spend what 3 or 4 tables of 4 would have spent without their patronage, they tip badly and stay until 1:30 AM. getting far too drunk and ignoring all subtle cues to get the fuck out.
It's a long night.
***
The end of the night, all the staff sitting down, a couple still serving the party from hell, most relaxing, the pedometers having proven a poor measure of worth, J has figured out how to shake them and rack up 10, 000 steps in a minute or two, the competition is off. A drunken native walks in off the street, wants us to call a cop car to take him to the lock up, won't leave unless we do, he refuses to go outside, it's too cold.
He's right.
And so the staff go through the motions of calling imagined friends and relatives, he provides us numbers, the party, they're shocked, they want to pay his cab to wherever he wants to go, he isn't going anywhere. What cabbie would pick him up?
I call the police,
It's an automated machine, not 911, this isn't an emergency, rather the local line, but I have to push buttons through 3 minutes of options before I get a live operator, another 10 minutes answering questions before they send out a car....
The party, most have never seen anything like this, they want to give him money, buy themselves a clear conscience, I try to explain, to him the police are cab drivers and the drunk tank's a warm hotel, like the Regency or Hyatt, they don't really understand.
Eventually the police come, take him away, the customers reluctantly leave, it's 1:30 AM. A long night. Come Xmas every night will be like this, December will be a long month. But 3 weeks yet before I need to worry about that.