Today was a rather busy and hectic day in the deli. It’s almost as if Christmas was soon or something.

I came in early this morning filling in the merchandiser role in place of my manger. Which means I got to put out product and make the orders for new product. Apparently today was a rather heavy load. I have a sneaky suspicion that perhaps this is why my manager chose this particular day off… It took me almost four hours past my usual time to finish (about 9am is when I usually get done. I finished at 1p…) getting all my fresh meat out and as for DPI (specialty cheeses and the like)… that never got done…

Typically, I get all my product out before I do the orders for the next day so that I know what product I actually need. However as fresh meat orders have to be in by 9:30am and I was far from finished in getting all my product out, I had to make educated guesses as to what needed to be ordered which I do not like at all. In my mad dash to send in my order before my cut off time, I had forgotten to order some italian pasta salad kits (all our salads are provided in kits) for a customer order that was going to be picked up tomorrow.

My failure to order it meant that we didn’t have the amount we needed for the customer so I faced calling the other stores to see if I was lucky enough to find one with extra or calling the customer and regretfully apologizing for our incompetence. The latter didn’t quite seem all that appealing.

So as I’m on my way to make some phone calls, one of the clerks made some off the wall comment of "why don’t you just make some yourself?" I just stared at him as he’s always making random comments like that. I started going on how we didn’t have the right sauce and tried to reverse-engineer the salad each time coming up with some excuses but then I started thinking it through a bit and decided how simple it actually would be. All I really had to do was add a couple more pounds of pasta and mix it in with the actual salad. So I grabbed some pasta off the shelves and cooked it in our chefs’ big woks. Woks are pretty much awesome and I really want one.

Then I mixed it up with the little we had. Surprisingly enough, it turned out really good. My biggest fear was that the pasta would be off but no, it was exactly the same there.

So one of the many crises of the day was resolved. Oh what a busy, busy day.

Oh… later we got a call from one of the checkstands saying that a customer was turning in our oven roasted chicken because it had "a beak" in it. I didn’t quite believe them as our chickens have no heads and there is really no way that one could sneak itself into the package without us seeing first but I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. I mean… anything’s possible right? A little while later one of the courtesy clerks came by with the beak. We look into the bag and just laughed. The so-called "beak" turned out to be a wing. Apparently headless chickens now have two beaks, one on the left upperside of the torso and the other on the right upperside. I’m not quite sure how one confuses a wing with a beak but I guess the two are more similar then I had imagined.

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