Bright Red Sticky Liquid

Saturday 18th July 2009
The Café was dead as a Dodo today and we had loads of staff in, amazing how much cleaning you can find for people to do really, if you try.
We were so quiet that we closed the café doors at 1.30pm and looked on course to be out of there by 2.30pm, which would have been a record.
Unfortunately, in his rush to get away Ian hadn’t put a rubber seal on the Slushie machine properly and when he filled it up with liquid the seal popped off and the liquid poured all over the place.
It’s amazing how far six litres of bright red sticky liquid can go, it was all over the machine and onto the worktop.
Having made a sticky mess of the worktop it then dripped onto the shelves below, this is when we find out that these super duper really useful deep shelves tilt very slightly towards the back of the unit, so guess where the bright red sticky stuff went?
You guessed it, we now have bright red sticky walls.

The liquid also managed to get onto the next shelf down, only this one didn’t tilt backwards, if anything it tilted forwards pouring the liquid onto the floor.
There was something strange about that shelf though, the shelf was stacked high with sleeves of milkshake cups all wrapped up in plastic bags and somehow the sticky red liquid managed to get onto every plastic bag protecting every sleeve of milkshake cups, even sleeves that were out of reach of the mess on the shelf.
The problem was we had to get it all cleaned up quickly before it started to dry, this involved taking everything off the shelves and taking it into the kitchen so that we had room to clean the shelves and the floor.
That bit we did without too much bother at all, it was after we had finished cleaning the shelves and were about to put everything back that we realised that all of these sticky sleeves had made a sticky mess everywhere they had touched a surface, so we then had to clean up the sleeves and the mess they had made.
By the time all that had been done and Ian had stripped down the Slushie machine and put it back together again, making sure that all the seals were firmly in position before filling it again with bright red sticky liquid, it was 4pm and Ian wasn’t a nice person to be near.
He had gone from having a bad day trade wise, to looking forward to finishing early for a change, to having to spend an extra hour and a half at work, stressed out because of a rubber seal.
Fraser was still not 100% today so Carolyn stayed at home with the kids, they appear to have spent the day perched in front of the telly watching the Pirates of the Caribbean films, one after the other.
We had a quiet evening and after the kids had gone to bed we watched a couple of episodes of the series that we are following, Torchwood and Life on Mars.
Torchwood wasn’t bad but we’re not yet totally convinced as to how good it is, Life on Mars is one of those series that we would have liked to watch when we were back in the UK but were too busy.