A Day of Absurdity

I would like now to write about the absurdity of the other day.

The other day, I arrived at the cafe as always - freshly rolled out of bed, still yawning, matted hair and dirty jeans and my usual I-don't-care-enough face of no makeup, bags under eyes. Upon arrival up the stairs to the room of Promised Chaos and Stress, I found M scurrying around, half the coffee pots empty, espresso all over the floor. I could tell it had been busy, and went to my usual first task of grinding coffee in the basement.

As I stood grinding the coffee - one of my favorite cafe activities, it smells so great! - I noticed C pacing around nearby. And by pacing, I mean pacing with ferocity and carrying a hammer, and literally fuming, suppressing what I think were the beginnings of screams. So, I concluded that yes, he was definitely the epitome of PISSED - bat out of hell pissed.

After a few loud slams and a couple of trays were thrown against a wall, he stormed past me into the office. Door slam.

Glass shatter.

The very frazzled and frightened looking book keeper emerging through the door with shards of glass poking into her shoe soles. Glass all over the floor. I asked her what is going on, exactly? She tells me that their cat, who had recently been lost outdoors and had caused a whole lot of grief and yelling and Utter Chaos the prior week, had now escaped via a tiny hole in the wall.

I see C emerge from the office, and I can tell his wrath is on a whole new scale of anger. He promptly slams his hammer into the wall, and I take that as my cue to go back upstairs to the room of Promised Chaos.

When I get back up there, arms full of coffee containers and my entire front brown with coffee grinds, I am confronted by the Boy Next Door. GREAT.

The Boy Next Door makes my heart leap and significantly decreases my abilities to act like a normally functioning human being. We'll talk about him later, though.

So, Boy is there, my heart catches in my throat and I forget how to speak and function like a human being, and M. asks me "WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON DOWN THERE?" and we hear more slams of furniture and/or hammer whacking, and then every customer (aka the entire town of Acton) comes to the counter to inform me that "the window to that cellar outside is broken." "Did you know that there is a broken window outside?" Next person. "HEY THERE IS A BROKEN WINDOW." "OMG DID YOU KNOW THERE WAS A BROKEN WINDOW!"

omg, did you know you all sound like a broken record, and that YES, i witnessed that window breaking.

An hour or two later, the cat is retrieved from the wall. Whew.

Meanwhile, a constant and loud hammering has begun upstairs. Upstairs, there is a cute little apartment that the cafe owners are about to move into. And of course, moving in always mean renovations. Today, the flooring was being redone, and the hammering was loud and quite obnoxious. And of course, when there is any form of a constant sound or unusual occurrence, customers will be more than happy to inform me of the Quite Obvious:

"Did you know there is a hammering noise?" (NO. I'm just deaf/immune to all noises because I am a worker and hence not a human being with hearing abilities).

"What's that hammering? Do you hear that? What do you think that might be?"

"WHAT IS THAT?"

"You know, that hammering has been going on for a while."

Multiply these questions and their various forms by about the entire town of Acton, MA, and you will have the number of times I had to hear and answer this question.

About mid afternoon, M leaves to go about her day, and I am left By Myself. Normally, this is fine with me, but I have an uneasy feeling about the things that will happen next.

And it is with my luck that the second M leaves, what feels like every person in Massachusetts decides to get on board the Cafe train and plow through those front doors, and I am left losing most of my mind in the midst of chicken tarragon orders and lattes and smoothies and cookies and dirty dishes and "order up!" and take out orders and busing tables and refilling coffee pots and brewing iced tea and losing most of my brain in the process.

And it is with my luck on this grand and eventful day that C decides to play with the fuses and thus accidentally shut down my main register. The one with ALL of the money inside. The one that, with no power, I cannot access in any way shape of form.

And suddenly, there is an "order up!!!!!" for obnoxious ice cream (yes, ice cream is obnoxious, more about that later) and I fly to the back to retrieve it. Of course it's actually not QUITE ready, and I have to wait awkwardly for a good thirty seconds. And while I wait awkwardly and customers see me waiting awkwardly and thus wonder what I am doing just standing there and why am I not waiting on then hand and foot, I hear it.

The water.

The Niagara Falls of floods inside of a building.

I hear it pelting the floor, spraying, dripping. And when I enter the room of Promised Chaos, there it all is, exploding happily from the ceiling - WATER. EVERYWHERE. I could have taken a shower right then and there.

I ended up placing a grimy and huge container beneath it and laughing. Customers were of course, mortified and fascinated, and I got to answer yet another wave of informative observations and Quite Obvious questions. "Water just poured from the ceiling." "Did you know that water just came out of the ceiling? What was that? Why was it pouring out?" "Do you know what the big leak was??"

It was the men upstairs. The ones that had been hammering and had thus created the first wave of ridiculous questions and concerns about the overall well-being of the cafe. They had hit a pipe, and not just any pipe - the toilet pipe.

And so, after nearly bathing in toilet water, making people pay with their credit cards or exact cash only, and witnessing a window smash/wall smash/missing cat, I decided that yes, this day was absolutely absurd and that yes, I love the things that are so unpredictable that we can only sit back and laugh at them in the end.