August 24, 2011

Great bread debacle

It’s been a heck of a week. You know when everything feels great but you’re afraid it’s the calm before the storm? That was last week.

We’ve had generator problems, openers over sleeping, kid dumping water on my electronic menu board at HSQ, budget over-runs on construction, and now, the great bread debacle.

One time when we had only one truck we came close to running out of bread. Our supplier had shipped us the wrong stuff, he said he’d send us new bread but the driver was very late and we almost ran out. But we’ve never faced anything like this. I’m still recovering.

I got a call from Rolando at 10:40am saying we were out of bread going into lunch. I couldn’t believe it. I thought he meant one location was low and I needed to send some out on the resupply van. But no. Out out. As in no bread. Anywhere. At any location. 4 trucks and 1 restaurant, 0 bread. And lunch was about to start in 10 minutes.

I asked Chris if he had platters. OK, if I’m honest I might have panicked a bit before I thought of that. He said yes, and that was it, we stole all 8 stacks of them. Sorry HSQ customers, that’s why you’re eating off of plates. The trucks used the platters.

So I gave some to John Lee and told him to get to GOV, I gave some to Megan and told her to get to MIT, and I hoped on the T to hit DWY. We sold a bunch of platters. These are something we’ve had at the restaurant for a while. Basically the Egg and Eggplant sandwich or the Chickpea sandwich sans bread. We add a salad and it makes a great bread-less meal. They’re really popular at HSQ but we’d never had them at the trucks. What did you think.

We had the bread guy drive directly to the trucks instead of driving to the commissary. By the way, he was supposed to have arrived by 10am. Uhgg. And there we found ourselves. Bread arrived at 12:30. I took 2 racks and hoped on the T to run the HSQ. Megan took some by cab to GOV. Rolando hit MIT and BUB using Enzo’s car. At 12:46 the emergency was over.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this stressed me out so much. I’m not a person who is easily stressed. I don’t know if it’s just how disturbing it was for me not to have had any visibility into this problem before it hit (a serious breakdown), or that I’m feeling increased responsibility with 115 employees. Or whether it’s just been a rough week. But there’s not question the incident left an impression on me. Nothing I want to go through again.

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