Today I was called in early for work because a manager had an emergency. I’m not sure why me, but hey, if I can get there, I’ll take the couple extra hours. It worked in my favor anyway since I’d be able to pick up the husband from work since I got off earlier and he wouldn’t have to shell out the cash for a taxi home.

What should happen a little over an hour after I start working? We lose significant power to our store. Our grills, fryers, shake machines, and air conditioner stop working. It was a slow shut down of everything we needed to sustain business. It was quite strange because it started with the shake machine not dispensing shakes, the monitors for the drive-lane cameras flickering and eventually the fryers were going cold and the A/C wasn’t blow cold air on my head anymore. The low drone the store usually has from all the machines disappeared and even with a store full of customers, it was too quiet.

Unfortunately, we had a store & drive-lane full of customers. We managed to get out a handful of orders before we had to just go ahead and refund money to customers. I was working the hand-out window for the drive-thru and had to be the bearer of bad news to a couple of cars that we couldn’t get their orders out to them and would have to refund their money. The first car was agitated as hell and asked if we could give them gift cards or something. I’m sorry, but while we try and make the customers as happy as possible, this situation was just one of those things where we couldn’t do much more than give them refunds and our apologies. I compare(d) it to an airliner expected to give customers what they want because the weather was bad. It’s not something we did and had control over, so, I’m sorry? Not to mention, the hours of lost business we had due to the power outage! It’s Labor Day weekend on a Saturday afternoon! Crap!

The power was out for a good couple of hours, so we had to pack everything with trash bags of ice that would spoil if they got too warm (milk, shake mix, meat, our dressing…). We had to dump out the shake machine, and yes… we partook in the “unusable” shake mix. We took to cleaning the store, stocking it up and waiting while one of the company’s handymen figured out what was wrong, and subsequently waiting for the power company to fix the issues with the power the store wasn’t getting. It was an interesting and kind of fun couple of hours, laughing with coworkers and kind of doing nothing when there was no more to do.

There’s only one other instance that I’ve experienced a store closure, at my old location, when we had a sewage back-up. We weren’t closed for nearly as long, though, since the problem was actually relatively minor and we didn’t have to wait for things to heat back up and such.

What kind of interesting things have happened in your place of employment, if any?