Chapter 1:
Tonight, we finished the last leg of a 15 month journey. The floor at Bloc 11 has been a little….tricky, to say the least. We went a rather inexpensive route, as the floor is always the last piece of buildout and towards the end, we had over extended our already over reaching budget.
So, the first error was choosing an epoxy “paint”. The second error was thinking that the subfloor was going to be fine. The building is so old that there were 4 different kinds of floor under the epoxy that we chose. The third error was thinking that slippage would not be an issue. The fourth error was trying to “remedy” all of these situations by bandaiding a festering wound. Because a year later, it just kept getting worse. We tried to patch certain parts of the subfloor and repainted. We applied a non-skid coating. The day after it was applied, I was walking to the kitchen, slipped in front of a dozen people or so right onto my rear and broke my phone. We then tried to re-paint parts of the floor that chipped up.
Chapter 2:
And after all of that, in November 2008, we decided that we would install a new tile floor. The tile is beautiful. Each one is unique and interesting looking. Actually, what makes it interesting might be the fact that if you look closely, which I would not encourage you to do, some of the tiles are installed upside down. The tiles were also installed during wet weather and water got onto wet grout. Many of the tiles slipped because people were walking on them. So, we closed the store early. Almost ten days later, the floor was “finished”.
Chapter 3:
The floor needs to get sealed. At this point, the contractors are sick of working overnights and decide that it is our job to seal the floor. Which finally gets me to my point, which is not about the floor at all, but about the multiplicity of our roles in a small business. Tonight, there were three of us working on sealing about 1700 square feet of tile. Dez is our general manager and Cole is our food manager. Both had worked a full shift earlier that day and will be back at 6:30 in the morning to put the store back together. Cole develops and makes all the recipes for our soups. Her salads are amazing and she can get more height from her greens than anyone I have ever seen. Dez makes sure that everything runs smoothly without breaking a sweat. She does all the orders for the store, makes sure that shifts are covered, and deals with me.
Chapter 4:
Maybe it is just our stores….I don’t have too much outside experience, but what I have seen over the years in our stores is that all of our managers tend to wear a lot of hats. From managing people, to placing orders, to making the schedule, to helping with training, to cleaning the bathrooms, to fixing a leaky sink, to sealing the floors, our managers do a lot to make sure that their work environment remains a place that they can be proud of and put a lot of effort forward to make sure that things run smoothly. It is impressive. And fun. And really special.
I had fun.
Thank you.
