"Oh, Wait - Are You Closed?"

There's one thing I will never, ever understand: how relatively sensible people lose all common sense the moment they step into a facility where they don't have to think.

In this instance, I mean TreeTop.

It never ceases to amaze me how little attention these people pay to things around them. 

Here's a scenario I deal with every single time I close café, no matter the day.

Setting: The Café
Time: after 8:00 p.m., when café closes, but before 9:00 p.m., when TreeTop closes
Cast: Me, Other Worker (in this case, Ross), Random Customer

In order to get everything DONE in café before TreeTop closes, we start closing café at 8:00. Sometimes, we "pre-close" starting at 7:30 if the place is deserted. Café takes an abnormally long time to close, because we have to pay so much attention to what we're doing. We can't afford any sort of health code violation. And Alex Burdette (hereafter referred to as "Russia") makes us scrub the place top-to-bottom. On week days, we move just the chairs in the eating-area; on weekends, we move the tables AND the chairs.

Ross and I were the only ones closing café on this particular Saturday night. I was cleaning up the eating area, and he was scrubbing everything behind the counter.

Now, when you stack the chairs, you have to put two in front of each entrance, so that it effectively creates a "barricade" that nobody's supposed to cross. I had stacked my chairs, and put my chairs in front of the entrances. Nothing was going to go wrong tonight.

It's now 8:26 p.m., give or take a few minutes. I've finished sweeping, Ross is counting the drawer. There are no lights on the menu, and I'm about to start mopping. I have started mopping, when this guy and his kid push the two chairs completely out of the way, and start walking up to the cash register, nearly slipping in my mop-water. I stare at them, dumb-founded.

The guy waltzes right up to the cash register and stands there for a moment, looking up at the menu. Ross realizes there's someone there, and looks up. He looks at me for a moment, and I look at him, and we trade looks of absolute disbelief.

Then he looks up at the customer. "Sorry, Sir, but we're closed."

The customer looks surprised. "Really?"

"Yes, Sir."

The customer turns and walks away, shaking his head, like I can't believe they're closed. They should have a sign or something.

Ross and I spend about five minutes freaking out over this person's stupidity, before we go back to closing café.

Some variation of this incident happens every time I close café. I wish I were joking. Sometimes they move the chairs to get in, sometimes they don't. They're often furious as to why we're closing café before the rest of the building closes. (It takes a heckuva long time to close the place, by the way. If we closed at nine, like everyone else, we'd often be there until 10:00 or so.)

"Oh, wait - are you closed?"
"Wait - y'all are closed?"
"'Scuse me, are y'all closed?"
"I can't even get a soda?" (No, sir; our cash drawer's been counted and taken, and the CO2's been disconnected.)
"Where're all the chairs?"

...

Seriously, people. Learn to read the sign outside the café door, or at the very least, don't act surprised when you walk into a place and find all the chairs missing, because they're closing. 

So, what's your lesson for this week?

Be considerate. Don't get mad at the workers for the hours that the employer sets. Don't get mad at them for something that they have absolutely no control over. Remember that the workers are people, too. Just because you're not ready to go home yet doesn't mean that THEY'RE not ready to go home. Remember, we've worked somewhere between six to ten hours that day, and we're just about dead on our feet. (Especially in café, because that's the singular most stressful station in all of TreeTop.)

I'm sorry if this got ranty, but I have to let this out some how. And I can't exactly do this at my workplace, at the customer, right? (I value my job, I'll have you know. I may not always like it, because I'm pretty sure it's causing me to go gray, but it's a good source of money, and I'm not ready to quit quite yet.)

Have a good week, y'all. Maybe next week, I'll have a more exciting story for you :)