So what was i doing at the O's stadium on opening day? I was working a stand. Originally i thought i would work the hotdog stand with the rest of the Boy Scouts Crew (this is a really long story) for my Dragonboat fundraising fun. Its typically 9-10 hrs of work and i get money donated to my dragon boat racing fund -- which cuts down on the amount of money i end up spending each dragon boat season for racing fees. (Just as an FYI each race has differing fees that range from 30$ to 70$ -- depending on what you are doing, # of boats, etc) So I was all set to work the kitchen area (cooking hot dogs, pretzels, and cashier) but instead i get asked to do a beer portable. Well ok -- i can do the beer portables, i just typically dont like to plunge my hands in cold ice water all day but sure why not, its suppose to be warm during the game right?
So i go to the beer portable (which is set on Eutaw Street), we look high and low and cant figure out where the stand is-- the portable numbers were taped on the side with 8.5x11 sheets of paper). Anyway when we finally found the portable, it was empty-- no cases of beer sitting next to it, no bags of ice... now its already 9:30-10am and the doors open in 2 hours... our stand sheet says we are suppose to have over 900 bottles of beer and everything has to be counted. Ok, well the beer should be here soon right? We're suppose to be set up 30 mins prior to the doors opening.. so at 11:30 we should be completely set up and ready for people. We sit back, relax twiddle our thumbs (what else were we going to do? -- nothing to count, nothing at the stand other that us) So we wait... and wait... and wait... finally ice shows up, and the beer kegs for the next stand over. The kegs show up without instruction on how to set up and apparently the guys next door dont know how to tap the keg -- so they are hopelessly lost, staring at the keg and the CO2 sitting there next to them. Good thing they finally get the attention of a stand manager, who sort of attempts to help them tap the keg, fruitlessly though, and then the Budweiser guy shows up and finishes tapping their keg for them. And all this time, we're still waiting for our beer to show up.
At noon, the doors open, and we stray from our stand, why you ask? Well at that point all we had was ice, we had asked multiple times for beer for our stand from various stand managers who all assured us that beer was indeed on its way up to us, but no one really knew where it was.. hrms indeed. At about 12:30 or maybe it was closer to 1pm, by then i had stopped looking at my watch, after pleading with various stand managers, the NPO manager and one of the higher ups, we finally see beer headed our way, yay! We count the cases that we had and had perfect counts-- even better! We started icing down the beer and putting them into the coolers -- mind you we had to take beers out of their cases to ice them so we have no clue how many beers we've now placed into our coolers, another flat of beers show up.. uh oh! we have to count them, but the stand manager doesnt want to wait, so we have to offload the beer onto our pallet. We were not done re-counting the cases that were left yet so now we're left with a dilemma, what was the new stash that showed up? We would need to report it in the end so we have to figure this out ASAP! Ok, so we make up realistic numbers (it doesnt matter anyway we are selling both beers for 8$ a bottle so it doesnt matter how many cases of whatever showed up)
The day was just very long, lots of beer opening, tips stuffing into Tim's pocket, counting out change... at somewhere after 5pm the game finally ends and we're able to eat lunch.. and count and pack up. Somehow we ended up with the end inventory, end sales and the money matching up to the dime -- so no figuring out things, no recounting necessary.. yay! Pack everything away, make Tim count the tips.. we sure earned a LOT of tips.. close to $350 just for our stand alone.. not to mention the other 2 stands that were part of our group.. so i guess not a bad day for us in general. Just frustrating because it took over 4 hours for 50 cases of beer to show up to our stand...
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