I received an email yesterday inquiring why I had not blogged about a big event that I took part in this past Saturday. I told my friend I had thought about writing about the "big" deal, but just had not taken the time to put pen to paper, so they say. Today I had the occasion to do some driving and thusly had the time to reflect and consider my thoughts.
The "big" deal was our church's annual Turkey Dinner, which I think, has been occurring for more than forty consecutive years. The dinner is held over three "seatings" and serves four hundred and fifty people. It is almost always a sell-out and when it is not, very few tickets go unsold.
My role this year was that of dining room manager, which simply means that, with the exception of where guests were seated, I was in charge of everyone and everything that happened in the dining room. There are actually two dining areas, relatively close in proximity, that the seating hostesses send diners to at random. It is a well-organized event with the only wild card usually being the human factor. Rarely are there mechanical failures or glitches - thank goodness.
The human factor can add elements of surprise, frustration, humor and, even, joy. The majority of people I supervise are younger - possibly between eleven and fourteen years of age. Their job, should they decide to follow the directions, is to wait tables in both dining rooms, pouring coffee, water, tea or milk, busing the tables when guests leave, and re-set each setting for the next guest who will take a chair in the students' assigned zones.
Theoretically, all should run smoothly and does - for the most part. The rough spots are almost always the result of kids being kids - like being distracted from doing their jobs by the cute opposite sex, giggling in the corners -probably about the cute opposite sex, and arguing amongst themselves about who has to go offer a beverage to this or that table. This year a new wrinkle presented itself with young men with not enough to do trying to hide out in a room where cute girls were working. Can't say I blame them for trying but the result was that these young boys apparently had not eaten dinner before they came to "work" and, subsequently, filled their bellies with as many dinner rolls as they could sneak and as many glasses of milk that they could drink before anyone caught on. Perhaps that is why, later on in the course of the three seatings, we ran out of dinner rolls and milk!
All in a night's work.
