Curt again typing here.
Well, being restaurant owners in another country was sure to bring lots of challenges. The first week has been nuts. We've been learning as much as we can as fast as we can, so that our manager can soon take significant time off to get married. So my days are filled with ordering coke and cheese from vendors, chatting with customers, and learning how to use accounting programs on the computer. It's been mostly fun, but yesterday was our first big incident.
So one of our staff was a girl named Olivia. She worked for the cafe for about a month, and was consistently getting into arguments with our manager (not a good thing in your first month at a place). I noticed and was concerned. Yesterday, our lead cook, a very faithful guy, caught Olivia copying down several of our recipes. She then got into a heated exchange with our manager. I was out at the time, and Michelle and I were hoping to have a much needed date night last night. But this situation needed us. I arrived, heard everyone's side of the story, and then talked to Olivia. I had decided in my mind to give her another chance, if she would simply admit her mistake, perhaps not knowing that she can't use those recipes for personal use. And I wanted to see that she respected our manager in myself.
Sadly, none of those things happened. Olivia claimed she did nothing wrong. She handed over her notebook with the recipes to me, and as I was looking at it, she tried to forcefully snatch it back out of my hands. Then she firmly criticized Michelle and me, and explained how the manager was completely unfair and hated her. Our manager, by the way, has worked at the restaurant two years and faithfully keeps track of every penny we spend. So I had no choice- we simply can't have someone like that on our staff, who in their first month can't respect a manager and a boss.
I am pretty sad about this though. It's tricky doing business here when we want to shine a Light. Lots of thoughts swirling in my mind about this, but I feel pretty confident we did the right thing.
So who knows what today will bring? Every day is a big adventure so far. I've often found myself thinking, "I can't do this!" But I have a pretty strong Helper who is doing a fantastic job to