Are You Ready? Lessons at the Diner

Over the weekend my family and I went on a hike of Multnomah Falls.  It was gorgeous!  Afterward we decided to go get some Sunday breakfast, so we stopped at a diner in the Columbia Gorge.  We are big fans of the Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives show, so we took a cue from the crowd and picked a place based on how busy it was.  And, it was busy…

We went inside and were greeted with a cheerful “We are all out of pancakes and it will be at least 30 minutes before we can serve you.”  *Sigh*  Not “Welcome to the busiest little diner in the Gorge!”  That was the start to a very interesting experience.

Once we were seated, the young bus girl was running around with a look on her face that resembled a cross between terror and confusion.  I tried to lighten the mood a bit by asking if they were always this busy.  She looked at me and said, “No, NEVER.”  I later found out that there was a blues festival in town, which I assumed was why they were so busy.

Be prepared.

So, what’s the point of my story?  Be prepared.  What happens if the windfall of success (in this case a restaurant bursting at the seams) happens?  Are you ready?  Having systems in place, no matter how simple can really help with whatever comes our way.  Here’s a few lessons I learned this weekend:

• Get your ducks in a row. It doesn’t matter how small the operation, if you are a well-run in the beginning you can handle it when you finally get what you want.  Kinda like when you order a burger and french fries at a very empty establishment and they give you a number?  You get the idea.
• Think big & keep your eyes open. That little diner never imagined that many people would converge on them that weekend.  If they had read the paper or seen the billboard on the side of the road, they would have made more pancake batter that morning.
• Good product only goes so far.  Our breakfast was really pretty tasty, when we eventually got it … and the silverware were finally clean.  But the frantic staff really ruined it.
• Have a sense of humor. Our experience would have been much improved if the staff had a sense of humor about the whole thing.  Some witty humor would have taken us all a long way.  Luckily most of us in the restaurant had a good attitude about it.

Unfortunately we won’t be going back to that little diner, which is a shame because I love little places like that!  They could have been having a bad day, or some tragic event happened at the grill, or whatever.  In the end I did learn some lessons which were, fortunately for us, free.