Overpreparing isn't always the best course of action.

An interesting situation arose yesterday at the restaurant that I work at. Four people left the company. It was an incredibly busy weekend, and everyone made a fair amount of money. However, busy means stressful.

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We found ourselves short on servers in the morning. Two servers did not show up. One of them finally called and said that they just couldn't make it, but they were already an hour late at that point.

This guy had called in on more than five consecutive days. Therefore they just let him go.

We give people lots of chances but that was just too much.

About halfway through the shift on Saturday I noticed that money of our servers were in absolutely terrible moods.

One of the largest servers that we have had a mental breakdown and started punching the wall. Apparently he had gotten stiffed on a $500 check. That was the third time had gotten stiffed that day. Sometimes you get stiffed because you have bad service but sometimes it is because people are cheap.

Another server quit randomly and I don't know why. I know that he had been feeling sick, but no one knew he was just going to walk out. It's true that service was very stressful that night but I really didn't expect him to leave. He was fairly new so it wasn't any huge issue though.

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One of our main servers quit though, and that is a big issue. He got in a fight with another another server that wouldn't leave his table alone. That server kept going over to check his tables and it frustrated the original server so much that he tried to fight him in the back of the restaurant.

The restaurant industry is a very aggressive environment.

I did not know that most of this had happened because I left yesterday in the afternoon. When I got to work this morning though, my boss was on the phone making a bunch of phone calls. Because we were going to be down four servers, he called every server in the neighborhood.

It's usually really busy this time of year. It isn't usually in the twenties though. This is the coldest day of winter that we've had. In fact, it's a huge surprise because it's been pretty warm this winter up until now.

Calling in extra servers was a good idea because we were four servers down. However, calling into that many servers was a terrible idea, because we ended up with a situation where nobody made any money despite the fact that we were quite busy.

Who wants to go work for 6 to 8 hours and come home with a handful of dollars after running their butt off all day? No one.

I understand that this has been really stressful weekend at a restaurant but I have to say....

Overpreparing isn't always the best course of action.