The Walker Brigade

Yesterday was going to start out being a day a leisure, for a couple of hours, followed by running around getting a ton of stuff done. Or so I thought. Well……I thought wrong….I had checked the schedule that is always posted on the kitchen wall, and it said I was off yesterday. Guess what? Wrong schedule, it was from last week. I got a call asking where I was….so I had to hop to, pull on my uniform and make a mad dash to work. (Had to do a quick hair spray sculpture, my hair looked like a fright wig)

Upon arrival I see three large tables set up for two groups of 11 and a group of 12. Oh yeah, when I pulled in the parking lot, a senior citizen bus had pulled in just before I did. I beat them inside by about 10 minutes.

So enter…The Walker Brigade….and they were all wearing red hats. Once they finally got situated, we had a total of 5, yes count ‘em 5 walkers scattered about the table. (I do not mean this in a disparaging manner, I’m simply making an observation) They were concerned as to whether or not the walkers were in the way…we told them not to worry, we would move them as needed.

What really surprised us was when they started ordering wine! But, what the hell, why not, none of them were driving!

The next group started arriving, they were all ambulatory under their own power, however they were not sporting red hats, but were of a similar age group. I asked the owner (who is in his late 60’s) to run over with a pot of decaf and refill their cups. I glanced at the table while he was doing this…and when he came back to the kitchen told him, “Hey, they really enjoyed the attention from you, young stuff!”

The third group arrived and we had to rearrange the walkers so they could get to their table. Just as we were bringing the food out for table number 3, The Walker Brigade was leaving, thus creating a bottleneck in the aisle we needed to use….so we had to circumnavigate the dining room…creating new aisles where there were none, moving chairs with our feet and squeezing between tables while hoisting trays over people’s heads.

Did I mention that between these 3 tables we had a total of 34 separate checks?

My day off finally began at 3:30.