Either I jinxed myself, broke a mirror, stepped on a crack and broke my mother’s back, or it must be a full moon tonight, today spiked my anxiety and depression through the roof. I don’t know what it is, but I usually keep a positive vibe with me about each day. I try to keep my stress levels down and keep my anger down to a minimum.

Sunday didn’t get the message. As I approached my place of employment and got out of my car in freezing temps, I had good intentions of the day. Well….the day went sour fast.

Running any business is rough. Duh! No one said it’s easy especially when your business has multiple equipment failures, and you’re in the foodservice industry. Imagine three expensive pieces of equipment: the ice machine, the pastry case and an overly expensive espresso machine all breakdown in one day. Yes, ONE day! They all decide to breakdown.

Remind you, the business and its equipment aren’t new, and it is time for an upgrade. But when you need ice to make cold drinks and need your case to be within temperature to store perishables and need a working espresso machine to make drinks; and they all breakdown simultaneously: all hell breaks loose.

Imagine the frustration of the manager aka business owner that’s trying to get things fixed as quickly as possible and hearing whine after whine from customers. I had numerous people ask, “What don’t you have ice? What kind of café are you?” Wow! Was all I can say? I kept thinking, “Don’t you experience a little chaos if something in your house or your car goes wrong?” My father has been dealing with the same car issues for months and handles the situation better than most.

One guy was so rude and said, “What! Did you forget to pay your ice machine bill?” Really funny! The problem is that the ice machine is old and has a huge leak inside that causes the machine not to produce ice. It’s a major equipment failure that requires extensive work that requires six hours of labor. So, that’s not the business owner’s problem, just an equipment failure. It happens.

After dealing with eight long hours of constant complaints, I was at wit’s end. I was tired of explaining to people that running a business and dealing with equipment failures is a part of the job. Things happen. Well…most don’t give two shits about that. And if that wasn’t bad enough, an innocent customer got nailed by a flying hot drink and completely covered his car with coffee. A disgruntled customer threw their drink meant for us but ended up hitting an innocent customer. I immediately called non-emergency police because I wasn’t going to allow some unruly and uncalled for the incident to go unnoticed. Someone could’ve been hurt. My company could’ve been sued. I was mad. The customer said not to bother calling the cops, and I couldn’t believe it.

I would be very upset if someone threw something at my car. I would be following that car and get their info because that’s inexcusable. But the reason why the customer didn’t want to deal with the cops was that he was in possession of illegal substances in his car. Unbelievable. The things that I’ve seen during my tenure as a business owner is unreal. I thought I’d seen enough, but no. For now, I need to calm down and focus my efforts on writing.