When the Going Gets Tough-Sept 8, 2007

 

I thought I'd tell you about the catering job from hell last Saturday.

I have three trailers, the oldest trailer, the 16' one, is rarely used these days. It's been recently reconfigured to support the super big jobs, and jobs which call for Pig Roasts *AND* grilled foods. Up till now, it's really never rolled for a roast. So when I took it out for Saturday's job, I expected a few bugs.. Well, I got them, and then some!

When I got to the Saturday jobsite, the first thing I noticed was the trailer electronics plug had somehow worked it's way out of the truck's receptacle, and dragged for the whole trip to Flemington, NJ.   A 50 Mile trip.    (I shoulda suspected something...The trailer didn't seem to stop as well as it should).   The plug looked like it been held against a grinder. Literally half of the plug was ground away. Fortunately, a crew member (Dan R) saved the day by (purchasing and) rewiring in a new plug.   Dan's saved my @ss several times.

Despite being careful backing the trailer in, and being aware of the hazard...a big tree scraped up the roof of the trailer, leaving a huge ugly dent.

When I connected the Mobile sink, I found the plumbing lines to be cracked from frozen water, that had frozen during the offseason.  This was the third sink damaged in the exact same way, this season. (At least I had the repair parts this time). I kicked myself for not checking it when I had the chance. I assumed that the chances of 3 sinks failing in the exact same way was slim to none! Doh!!!   Took an unusually frustrating 45 minutes to fix.

I melted a $12 Insta-read Thermometer by stupidly leaving it in the roaster for 5 minutes.

2 Full Propane Bottles stopped working.   The same valving issues that I've been wrestling with all year.

I had a small batch of Sternos that kind of slipped thru the cracks.   Probably sat in a small milkcrate in the back of the trailer for years. Saw 100 Freeze/thaw cycles. When we opened them, they were clearly discolored. About 3/4 of the way thru their burn time, they decided to "sneeze" their contents out of the can . The second one started a small fire on one of the plastic tables.   Melted a hole in the table. I discarded the rest of the box of sternos.
 

Due to the yard we were in, we had to dispose of the semi-spent charcoal into a galvanized garbage can. I stupidly made the mistake of tossing the contents of the grease bucket into the can…rather than dumping it into the woman's nice garden. The flume of smoke and ash exploded like Mount Saint Helen's…pretty much covered Ryan too, who was poised with the garbage can lid.  The ash drifted over half the food in the line, got all over the tables... and drifted right into the party tent. Everyone looked at me like I was The biggest idiot. Everything downwind of Mt. St Helens got little speckles of grey on it.   The white tablecloths.   Everything.   What a mess!    I wanted to crawl under a rock and die. I was horrified at my stupidity. Fortunately the food service was in the tail end, so not many people noticed the damage to the food..

I've never seen anything like it. I was pretty frickin' traumatized by day's end. As usual, operating on 2 hours of sleep, and aggravated the entire day.

Still the client and guests were raving. I guess most of the disasters were somewhat unnoticed by the guests. And fortunately, there were workarounds for most issues. I was surprised the client payed. I took the check and RAN out of there.

The fun continued for the Sunday job in Hackettstown.   So I arrive to the next Client's house.   I park the trailer, and drop the gate.   I have a flap top box with all of the plastic disposable forks/knives/spoons each packed into their own smaller flaptop containers. In transit, the  box tipped over and was found upside down, emptied of it's contents.. All the plastic forks/knives/spoons were all over the floor, under the roaster, in every corner of the trailer.   All I could do was shake my head, roll my eyes and laugh.   This was surely a bad omen for the continuance of the worst catering weekend ever!

But I'm happy to report that that was the last of the aggravations, and the job proceeded smoothly.   Quite fun actually.

 

I'll tell ya...the cooking part is easy.   It's all the other stuff that I dread.

 

 

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