A Night At The Dome

In the land of plastic and concrete, I spent the evening serving up beer and dome dogs.  The Minnesota Twins were hosting the Kansas City Royals in an eleven inning affair.  The Twins loss was fairly meaningless to my night since I could see neither the game nor the televisions in the concourse.  What I could see was a steady stream of patrons in front of the concession stand in which I was working.  We kept steady through seven innings, after which the beer sales were terminated.

The concession stands at Metrodome are staffed by volunteer groups providing fund raising opportunities.  I was working with a group from the church I attend which is endeavoring to raise funds for our youth group.  This was the first of four nights with an optional fifth game.  To some of our group it was fun, to some it was work, and I was somewhere between the two.  To me it was a cross between the Domino's I used to manage and the food booth I worked at as a teenager at the state fair.  The people watching and interaction was enjoyable but I was confined in a space with a job to do.  I was also reminiscing about my sales jobs of the past when long hours were spent standing on concrete at trade shows.  The memories were provoked by the knees and back stiffness.  One unexpected consequence was a raspy throat.  I never dreamed that I would have a sore throat from talking too much.  I didn't fully realize the diversity of the crowd before looking at ID's from Minnesota, both Dakotas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Canada and Sydney, Australia.

All in all it was a good night.  Our stand pumped out much more product than was expected of us and our combination of money and inventory was well within the one half of a percent margin of error.  It was impressive for this rookie group.  Our group worked well together as a team and we had no disorderly customer issues.  I guess I view the night as an interesting activity for a worthy cause.  It was a satisfying feeling of accomplishment after eight hours of steady production through prep work, serving and clean up.