Sunday night is typically a slow one at the ol’ restaurant, and the staff is pared down accordingly. This can result in hairy situations. This past Sunday, when 7:30pm rolled around, it seemed that ALL the residents of Boston made the choice to dine out.

Needless to say, my coworker (note: singular) and I ran around like maimed, (yet mission-oriented) chickens trying to keep up with the demands of the 60 people who all sat down at once. When the restaurant gets to this level of insanity, each staff member’s control and efficiency becomes a delicate flower that can be crushed in a second by the tiniest of requests, never to be regained.

Example:
In the midst of the seating frenzy one of my guests ordered the gnocchi and declared she couldn’t eat cheese. There is cheese in the actual gnocchi itself, so, as a compromise, I offered her the same dish with linguini instead of gnocchi. Great. Problem solved.

That is until the dish came out with grated cheese on top.

Needless to say this kind of setback pushed me to the brink of THE DARKNESS of the weeds, and into the laser beams of wrath shooting from the kitchen

Why did this mix-up happen?

Option 1: Because, even after going to the trouble of fixing my customer’s problem at the table for her, I forgot to let the kitchen know about her allergy (I am a flake).

Option 2: My brain was unwilling to accept the validity of this woman’s allergy to the almighty cheese, and judged her persistence in ordering a dish that, in its intended form, contains cheese. (subtext: I’m lactose intolerant and still a cheese lover/eater, and therefore justified in my judgments of fellow lactose intolerants.)

You can pick the best answer, but I think the overarching moral of this story is NEVER SAY NO TO CHEESE (and, maybe, “always write things down”).