With just over a month to go to Easter and hot cross buns in the supermarkets since January, I thought I would share a memory with you.
More than 30 or so years ago, when I was working at (what was then) Mooloolaba Pub, I had the bright idea of changing our boring dining menu into something more upmarket.
That meant outsourcing to someone who knew what they were doing. The late great John Douglas and his business partner Rob Guthrie came to mind. They hatched the idea of a wood-fired pizza oven in the beer garden of the pub and called it Spagalini’s.
The concept was agreed on by all parties, and it was due to open Easter Saturday, which meant we all worked Good Friday to get it ready. I oversaw getting the uniforms, which were delivered that week, and it was very exciting and slightly stressful.
About halfway through Good Friday, John comes to tell me he had forgotten about getting a new till. Could he borrow one until he did?
So, I went into the storeroom where there were a thousand old tills and found one that had a tag on it that said it had been repaired. I showed John, who liked the till but not all the old band stickers. I spent an hour-and-a-half cleaning the till to his approval and then plugged it in. The receipt reel just kept spinning. John innocently asked me why I didn’t check to see if it worked before I wasted my time cleaning it.
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While it was a very good question, something clicked in my head. I ripped it off the counter and threw it into the beer garden, where it smashed into a thousand bits. After I composed myself, I swept up the mess and calmed down the staff who were in the vicinity. I found another till and everything else was okay.
By Sunday afternoon, in the helter-skelter of Easter trading, things were going great until John came to me again and asked if I noticed anything about the uniforms that didn’t look right.
It turned out that when I proofread them, I was so focused on the Spagalini’s spelling that I never noticed ‘Mooloolabah’. Of course, there is no ‘h’ on the end (people often mix up Mooloolah River and Mooloolaba) which I never picked up. I had 40 shirts to replace at my cost.
Every Easter, I think of John Douglas and all he taught me – detail being the top of the list.
Ashley Robinson is Mets Caloundra CEO, chairman of Thunder Netball and a lifetime Sunshine Coast resident.
