Seasonal restaurant, getting towards the end of the season, you only have 3 cooks, and 4 wait staff, all who have to cover breakfast lunch and dinner, in some combination.

Now, think that the night before your busiest night of the week, one of the wait staff goes out with the head chef and gets plastered, the chef takes a cab home, meanwhile the other gets taken in for criminal mischief and DUI.

We somehow make it through Friday night, but our remaining three wait staff is not happy, especially the one who has to come back in the morning and work breakfast.

Next night, in order to cover for the missing waiter who won't get out until Monday (and the owners are posting bail, because 'he's such a nice guy,' and we really need the help) the morning shift came back in to help the evening shift. Things are going fine, we are getting busy, doing an awesome job at selling the specials to get rid of stock before we close.

Then BAM, we run out of gas.
(I guess when the gas man blew himself up; the owners forgot to hire someone else in their rush to send condolences and free food.)

Least to say, the chef was not happy with a dining room full of hungry people, and no way to cook their food. And the owners will not let us send them away. So we send someone off to the warehouse to dig out the two hotplates we used mid season for omelet stations on a buffet. And we get cooking; each dish needs at least three different pans of food heated. We finally feed everybody, wrap everything up and are ready to close our doors two hours early, when a friend of the owners shows up.

"Sure you can com in to eat, what? You want the most complicated dish on the menu? Well we just ran out of gas and the cooks can't easily cook ANYTHING, but sure!"

We can't really tell the owners to go shove it (although by this point it would be really nice) so we pull everything back out fire up the hotplate and get working, and wouldn't you know it, but it runs out of gas too!!!!

:: facepalm ::

so we were sitting there trying to cook this spectacular dinner to impress a friend of the owners on fucking STERNO from the chafers.

*sigh