Fourth of July, last year. I was opening and working the pizza station. Over the previous week, management was trying something new and having a lot of open shift come in an hour later than they had been, so that they would be able to stay through most of the dinner service.
This worked out fine for 99% of everything as two hours to prep before open was honestly a little much. For the vast majority of jobs, an hour before open was sufficient...but this didn't work very well for pizza for two big reasons. The first one being that the oven had to be turned on two hours beforehand just to be warm enough by the time we opened and the second being that the opener had to stretch all their dough on their own until 1:30, when a second person would come in. it could maybe be done on something like a slow Wednesday where everything went perfect and somebody remembered to turn the oven on before I got there.
So basically, I get there at 10 AM, to open at 11. I look in the cooler and realize we have no sauce made (turns out someone spilled it all the night before). Great, that's something else I have to do. Go to grab the ingredients and decide to pop in to check on the dough just because why not? Now here's where stuff starts getting fun.
The guy who normally made our dough for us had gotten into a brutal car wreck about a week earlier, so someone that didn't really know what they were doing had been making it. It was often overproofed but still workable. Not today. This smelled like rancid old beer. I opened the lug to notice it was one solid sheet of airy, poofey, practically unworkable dough. It had clearly been left in the proofing room way too long.
So, now I have two problems. No sauce, and barely workable dough. But at this point, I only have about 45 minutes to get ready, and oh, did I mention that the 2nd largest Fourth of July parade in my metropolitan area was set to start right outside my door at 11 AM?
I take a quick gander out the window and we already have a line formed a dozen or so call-in orders for pizzas. At this point, I know I'm completely and utterly fucked. I seriously contemplated just leaving then and there.
So I get to work. I make the sauce with just barely enough time to get some dough stretched to make most of the 11 AM pickup orders (though let me tell you, these were some fucked up looking pizzas). I then proceed to work until 12:30 PM through the worst service of my life. It took until 1:10 (20 minutes until my help came) for anyone to even realize how fucked up and awful my situation was despite my hundreds of cries for help over those two and a half hours.
I stayed for another two hours to help my relief get things back into some semblance of order (fortunately once the parade actually started, business slowed down) before I told the sous that I was simply too frustrated, pissed off and tired to keep working.