A case of the Mondays.

Monday night was the craziest night I've seen in a really long time. We had a wait for 2.5-3 hours, which is unusual enough for a Monday. I wasn't particularly struggling, but some of my coworkers were, and I think that was mostly a matter of luck. California Girl and Flirty Priest both had table after table of cranky fuckers--they were both ready to just punch somebody. I really lucked out; with one exception my tables were all cool, they were talking and enjoying their evening, rather than freaking out at me.

My biggest problem was that Brainless II was hosting, and did a typically idiotic thing. One of my booths had five people at it, which means a chair on the end, in the aisle. Not a big deal ... until a certain moronic hostess seats a big top right next to them. There was less than a foot of space between the two chairs, and no way to fix it. So in the middle of the rush, anybody wanting to get to the western half of the restaurant had to go alllll the way around and through the lobby (which of course was still full!). All of my tables were on the other side of that divide, so I really had to pay attention and be sure I didn't forget anything on any of my trips up there--it just took too long to make the detour.

The three cooks put up a valiant fight, and most things went out correctly and only 5-10 minutes late. But at the end of the rush things just totally crashed even with Pot Smoking Manager helping them. And thank god he was there instead of Lapdog--one of my favorite things about PSM (aside from the fact that he is fucking hilarious) is that when things go wrong, he doesn't waste time assigning blame or yelling. He just jumps in and fixes it, unlike Lapdog who apparently feels that stopping to rip people new assholes is a more efficient use of time.

Even with PSM cooking, my last three tables during the rush waited 45 minutes for their food. Strangely, none of them were really upset. One did take their food to go, but they weren't angry. I felt bad for my coworkers who had douchebags all night long. In the end, I made about double what I usually do on a Monday night. Some of that was due to the fact that one of my section buddies isn't that strong a server; she couldn't handle her six table section (especially once she had to start detouring around the whole place to get to all of her tables!), so one of her tables became unofficially mine. I was grateful for that, since one of my booths was taken up by a couple of very nice but very oblivious women who were there before we got busy and didn't leave until after the 45-minute-wait people had all eaten and left.

By the end of all this, even though it could've been worse, I felt like I'd been beaten with a very large and dirty stick. And I'd picked up a close, naturally! Tuesday night we were better prepared; we had five cooks and eight servers. Think we were busy? Hell no.