Your Average Night's Catastrophe

It's one in the morning and I'm fresh off of a typically stressful night and I now realize that my previous entry did not adequately convey the badness of the bad nights at work. I want to try to capture the magnitude of the badness by recounting the precise details of the night that just ended:
At 3:30pm, I arrive at work and set up my station and start off the night's prep work by slicing three trays of cheddar crackers. Then I'm told to peel shrimp, so I head to the walk-in cooler and there encounter the fifty pound tub that will torment me on and off for the duration of the evening. So I lug out the tub of shrimp on ice and put on gloves to protect my hands and begin peeling. But Steven is a little testy this evening and he decides to single out my shrimp-peeling abilities as the object of his frustrations. First he tells me to remove my gloves because they're slowing me down, and when I tell him the shrimp tear my fingers he tells me to toughen up. So I remove the gloves and continuing peeling, but I'm still slow and everyone in the kitchen seems painfully aware of my slowness, and Steven keeps pacing by and goading me forward by chanting "go, Rachel, go!" in a tone that is one part playful, two parts menacing. Ben and Didier both come back and give me shrimp peeling demos, and I try their techniques but my fingers are clumsy and slow and Steven tells me ominously that I WILL get all my work done tonight ("or else" implied) and by now the thought has crossed my mind that this tub of smug crustaceans could cost me my job.
And before I can even begin to make a dent, the dessert orders start coming in so I have to postpone the peeling and stash away the shrimp, but the back table is packed with pig parts that Bill is curing and I have to make do with one table for dessert plating and shrimp peeling, a dubious combination at best, but not one that can be avoided. So I haul the tub of shrimp down underneath the table and plate the dessert order and then haul the shrimp back up. But then, before I can peel more than three or four shrimp I find out that they burned two of the three trays of cheddar crackers that I sliced earlier and I have to slice more asap. So I pull out the logs of dough and bring out the slicing machine and start slicing crackers, but mid-way through I get more dessert tickets, and I'm balancing trays of crackers on top of the tub of shrimp, which is all on the dessert table, so I have a shrimp-cracker-dessert triple whammy on my hands and I stash away the shrimp and crackers, plate the desserts, then get back to the crackers just as a server comes back and says, whoops, she by accident told her table the wrong sherbet flavor and now instead of roasted banana sherbet they want Meyer lemon. so I tell this server sure, no problem, and curse her privately in my mind and make her two new sherbets, then I finish the crackers and haul the shrimp back up onto the table and I'm about to resume peeling when Joe informs me suddenly that he needs some of the peeled shrimp deveined and marinated and brought to him fast or he's going to run out. So I lose precious peeling time while I prepare him the marinated shrimp, and I'm about to get back to peeling when a double emergency presents itself--the line cooks need grated Grana Padano at the oven station, and more bean cakes at the saute station. So I frantically run to the cooler, find the bean cake mix and churn out a tray of bean cakes, but before I can get to the cheese Didier appears all sweaty and flustered and he needs more picked mint and parsley at the fry station. I can tell he's in a jam but I need to get the Grana grated, so I tell him lo siento but I can't do it right now and he puts Marvin, the dishwasher, on the job, so I go to grab mint and parsley for Marvin and they are high the fuck up there in the walk in and Marvin is no taller than I am so we reach and jump and grab until finally I get them and I shove them into Marvin's arms and then grab the Grana Padano and make a dash for the grating machine. I return to my station with the GP and the grater just as Joe comes back and tells me he urgently needs a six pan of grits, so I run to grab a six pan and head to the cooler. The grits are over in the far reaches of the room and I know that it will take me a while to maneuver the heavy pan out of its position, but luckily the pan is at the top of a stack and the grits are accessible with the pan in place, so I open the top and start grabbing handfuls. I'm awkwardly propped between buckets of gumbo and chicken stock on one side and racks of bacon on the other (the walk-in cooler is its own beast, and I could devote an entire entry to the mishaps that have befallen me in its chilly depths), and my open hand fits into the pan fine but when I make a fist around the grits my hand widens and I can't remove it as easily, so each time I squeeze out a handful I leave a smear of grits on the roof of the shelf, and meanwhile the bottom of my apron is dangling into a bucket of chicken stock. I run the grits to Joe and skid back over to the Grana Padano and it's hard as a rock, and I struggle for longer than I should cutting off a wedge, and then I begin shoving the chunks into the grating machine and it is shooting a spray of Grana in all directions and I'm using a cupped hand to re-direct the spray into the container and away from the pineapple and citrus salad and malt cream that are sitting close by. I finish with the cheese and haul the shrimp back up onto the table, and by now the ice in the tub has melted so the gallon buckets I'm using to hold peeled shrimp have set sail and are floating and careening through a murky gray lagoon. And just when I'm getting close to the bottom of the tub it's time to plate desserts for a party of eighteen, and I've been so tied up with bean cakes and crackers and shrimp and GP that I've forgotten to whip cream or slice lemons, so I rush to do those things just on time to fire the eighteen desserts, nine lemon buttermilk pies and nine apple cobblers.
By now it's ten thirty and I only have a gallon of shrimp left and I've switched out the tub for a smaller pan with fresh ice and things are looking up except that each time I peel a shrimp now there is an excruciating burning in my thumbs at the inner corner of the nail where the skin is raw from tearing open hundreds of spiny shells. So I deviate from the established peeling method and develop a new, less efficient system that relies more heavily on my index and middle fingers and excludes my throbbing thumbs as much as possible, and I get to the last shrimp and involuntarily yell out loud with joy that I'm done. There is still another hour and a half of clean-up work to do, including breaking down my dessert station, wrapping briskets, transferring ribs, packing up rice, and preparing stock pots, but all of this is a walk in the park now that the shrimp are tucked away in bags and the customers are gone and I've snuck back into the cooler to wipe away the grit marks that were the only remaining evidence of the past eight hours of mayhem.