Late Builders

Tuesday 3rd March 2009
Last night we got a call from our builder telling us that he would be here at 8am to start work on putting a stud wall up, we are going to turn our as yet unused dining room into an Office/Guest Bedroom.
The call was unexpected as they had told us they couldn’t get here until the end of this week or the beginning of next so we had arranged for Carolyn to work in the Café today, but we want the work done as soon as possible because Ians dad and Janet his new wife and long term partner are coming down to see us this weekend and it would be handy if we could put them up without having to move the kids about.
The builders turned up at 9.45am, spent 15 minutes getting all their gear out and then stopped for tea. Throughout the day there was nearly always one of them shopping for materials, door handles etc, they did end up working until gone 7pm though, so we suppose we can count that as a days work.
With Carolyn not at work, needless to say we were busy, it was quiet for the first couple of hours and then it went ballistic.
There we re only four of us working because of Carolyns absence, Fliss and Ian were on the front counter taking orders and making coffee but had nobody to take the coffee to the table, while Aden and Michelle did a sterling job in the kitchen making up the orders ready to be taken to the customer but they had nobody to take them to the table.
In the end the way it worked was, Fliss would take the orders and Ian would make the coffee, when there were a couple of orders worth of coffee on the counter waiting to be taken to the customer one of us would run round to the other side and deliver the coffee while the other would carry on taking orders. The person that took the coffee out would clear any tables on the way back, putting the dirty crockery next to the dishwasher and then come back to the till only to find that there was now a large backlog of coffee orders.
In the kitchen Aden and Michelle would make up a couple of orders, run them out to the customers, clear some tables on the way back, put the dirty crockery next to the dishwasher and then find that the mountain of food order dockets had grown.
This went on for about an hour and a half and by the time we had cleared the decks of orders you couldn’t see the dishwasher under the pile of dirty cutlery and crockery, we had used all of the new crockery that we had bought as part of the refurbishment of the Café and most of the crockery that we used to use and had stored away never expecting to use it again, it took about an hour to get it all washed and to get the kitchen back to some sense of normality.
Fliss came in to work today and worked very hard, Ian had asked her to stay for a chat after she finished at 4pm but she left a bit sharpish while Ian was busy, saying that she would be in early tomorrow so it didn’t happen.
This evening Fraser and Marisa went to Scouts and Marisa was invested, she was one of two girls that were being invested tonight.