A Bad Start

Monday 19th January 2009
After more than a year of being out of the pub and working the same sort of hours as most people, Ian is still struggling with getting up in the morning and today was no different.
Mondays are always a bad start for Ian because he starts work at the Café at 7am with the Café opening at 8am, this is never enough time on a Monday to get everything organised, but it is close and there is no way Ian is going to get up an hour earlier and start at 6am, which is the time he should start to finish all his chores comfortably.
Today, whatever could go wrong did go wrong, one of the staff starts at the same time as Ian on a Monday so that they can do the basic setting up of the Café while Ian puts together the Ice Cream Machine and the Slushie Machines, sanitises them, makes up the mix to go in them and gets them running by 8am.
Today Michelle was the early starter, she had her blonde head on, she didn’t have a clue where all the outside furniture should be, she didn’t have a clue where the inside furniture should be, she is obviously one of those people who just gets on with life and doesn’t really take much notice of how things happen as long as they do. Today they happened because Ian stopped what he was doing and helped organise things.
We then had a fairly constant flow of phone calls, delivery drivers and reps on our doorstep, now what sort of self respecting rep calls on a customer before 9am, well today it was all of them.
The Café opened at 8am as usual, minus an Ice Cream Machine and two Slushie Machines, then Ian had to go to Coles supermarket to pick up some bits so that the Michelle could make up the Panini for the day (we don’t just make up one of them, Panini is the plural and Panino is the singular), when he got back from Coles he called in the reinforcements, in the form of Carolyn, it was the only way the machines were going to get put back together today.
After Carolyn arrived, Ian managed to get everything up and running by about 10am, only two hours behind schedule. The rest of the day was fairly busy, so Ian didn’t have a chance to let his early morning frustration fester.