An American Holiday

The annual Super Bowl has become a national holiday in our country and what better way to celebrate it than with chicken wings?

I have been working at the New York Wing Factory in Fort Lee, NJ since July 2014. We have been busy before, but never quite as busy as this past Sunday. As a hostess, my job is to seat people and take orders for take-out. This past Saturday, the night before the Super Bowl, there was about twenty people who pre ordered wings for take out on Sunday for the super bowl. Then, on Sunday, the day of the Super Bowl, all hell broke loose. Normally on a Sunday, there are no more than 30 take-out orders, but this past Sunday, there had to be at least 100, and probably more.

The phone was ringing off the hook, so much that it became a disturbance to other customers in the restaurant. Every time I, or my other coworker, hung up the phone, it rang again for another take-out order. I arrived at work at 11am on Sunday, and from the moment I got there, I was putting in orders all day long. The majority of the orders were requested not to be ready until 5pm that night, so naturally, the chefs waited until last minute to cook the orders. Little did the kitchen know that they had to complete all 100 orders within the hour. At 5pm, a wave of angry, aggravated, steaming customers barged in the doors, demanding their take-out orders. I took the payments of the waiting people and sent them over to pick up their orders, but I was unaware of how long they would really be waiting. One girl came up to me and told me she had been waiting 2 hours and wanted to speak to the manager. I got my manager and was surprised that the woman had been waiting that long. This woman was the first of many who became frustrated with my restaurant on Sunday. Another lady came up to me and asked me why her wings were not ready if she pre ordered them the night before. I was alarmed that I was being pestered as if I was the chef making the wings myself.

At about 6pm, when the Super Bowl was about to start, people became furious that they did not have their wings and that they had ordered them up to 12 hours ago. My manager called the owners and they came charging in after a number of minutes. Once the owners got to the restaurant, they threw on chef hats and gloves and began cooking. There were about 12 chefs in the kitchen at this point and a huge crowd of people, with a line forming down the block to get into the restaurant. After dozens of people shouting, fighting, and arguing, I stepped back from the scene and saw how terrible it was. It made me hate football and made me see how crazy people can really get, but then, it hit me. I realized how much of  a big deal the Super Bowl was. I saw the excitement of the game and the intensity of the entire nation coming together for a sport.