Mother's Day Chaos

      Today is Mother's Day.  I love my mother, and all of my extra mother's that I have adopted over the years, but when you work in a restaurant Mother's Day, Easter, and Valentines are some of the most dreaded days of the year.  The boss always wants to over complicate things by having a million specials and then you know you are going to be working at capacity all day long.  The day just becomes stressful.  You do your best to go in with a positive attitude, and sometimes you are successful at maintaining it. . . sometimes not.  So the doors open and they come.  Seems like the whole world is flooding in.  The food starts to roll out, everyone gets into their groove and everything is going fine. 
      Then disaster strikes.   Something goes wrong.  Someone missed an order or messed up a ticket.  Something falls on the floor.  Plates break. . . hopes shattered.  From here on out the rest of the day is just catch-up.  Did they ever get that extra stack of pancakes, or are these them? And do I need to put another on for that order that just came back, or am I ahead.  You people do know I can only cook two waffles at once, and when 12 come in over a 3 minute time span some of them are just going to be late, there is nothing I can do to make them cook faster.  Neither I nor the waffle iron are magic.  Finally the surges come and go, you get yourself back on track and you keep going. 
      That five minutes outside in tears really didn't help any except to get your frustrations out, because really there was no one to blame, and no one to yell at, so and empty wall, or the vacuum of the walk-in does just as well.  You breathe, you de-stress, (you wish for that shot of whiskey that never comes) but in the end you get through it.  And if you don't make it through, if you make that choice to just leave-- to quit, then you really aren't a cook.  You are just that person that didn't make it, that wasn't up to snuff.  If you do make it back, you throw yourself back into the fray with new determination to be the best and to make it happen. 

      It ends, though, and you find out that you couldn't have really been in hell as you thought.  Hell has no endings, just an eternity of oppressive heat and all those things you hate most.  It ends, and then there is the cleaning.  I don't know what it is, but there is something about cleaning at the end of a busy day that just clears the mind.  As you scrub the grill it's like wiping clean the slate for a whole new day.  It's amazing how the grime and the stress can be scrubbed away with a few minutes of work.  I find a release in the fact that all the chaos of the day can so easily be put back into order.  Dishes cleaned, counters wiped down, food organized, labeled and in it's proper places.  A place for everything and everything in it's place.  (Just wish I could feel like that at home!)  And once everything id done, everyone is cleaned up, floors are mopped and left to dry, you know that whatever happened today is gone, not forgotten, but eased and corrected by the simple task of cleaning.  Because. . .

This is a fractal pattern of broccoli, why you might ask? Because I like fractals . . . and Broccoli oh yea, and fractals are a visual interpretation of the order of chaos

       even in chaos we find order.  And even in the little things we can
find our peace.