When you arrive, there is only one, of the usual four, prep cooks waiting outside the back door, surrounded by your dry-goods order, which the driver left piled outside, already two-hours gone.  You consider just walking away but decide to open the door and see if you can salvage the day.  You already know that the reservations are over-booked with large office parties full of bosses taking their staffs out for their yearly "free lunch".

You get inside and begin to call everyone on your employee phone list but all you get are answering machines, voice mails and the occasional busy signal.  The head chef calls in sick.

Your lone surviving prep cook, already having informed you that the rest of them left after waiting an hour and a half, has about one third of the prep list done by the time your opening server is scheduled to arrive, who, of course, has not shown up yet.

The phone begins to ring, mostly large parties calling to confirm their reservation, or trying to make more.

"We're booked solid through the whole day and night," you say to the ones trying to book tables.  To the others, you offer a weak, "Yes, you are confirmed."  

By the time you are supposed to open, you have about enough food ready to get through maybe half of a normal, slow lunch shift, two line cooks, 2 of 11 scheduled servers and a lobby full of people waiting to be sat. 

Courageously, you seat as many parties as you can by yourself and head back into the kitchen, where you spend the next three hours watching tickets roll to the floor.

Just as you are about to do your "Dead Man Walking" impersonation to the Front of the House and announce, "May I have your attention, please be informed that it will probably be around 2 hours before your order arrives but it will all be free today," the health department inspector walks in.

Everybody is yelling at you.

Your alarm goes off, you get up and go into work 2 hours early that day...

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