In Which We Move Forward

Howdy friends! It's certainly been a rollercoaster of a time since the last time we met up on this ol' blog, I tells you what. But we'll get to all that in a bit - we like to do what we can to stay upbeat* around here, so we'll start with the good stuff!

First and/or foremost, we'd like to extend the sincerest of thank-yous to all of y'all who made it out to our birthday "party" on Saturday! It may not have been the pretty princess prancing pony party we were envisioning (we had so many ideas! Like maybe hiring an actual sound person for the bands! Or setting up an actual stage! Or hiring a clown to follow Chris around and annoy him all day!), but in the end we still got to drink tasty beers and eat good food and we got to see a bunch of friends, and in the end that's really why we're doin' all this in the first place, so we'll call it a success. In other words: thanks for coming out, it was good to see you. ​

And. Moving on to some "news you can use," it is hitherto advantageous that we inform you posthaste of the fact that we! Are! Hiring! Thassright, anybody who's lookin' to get "into the fray" in the professional Glorified Janitor biz is encouraged to click on over to our job posting and send an application our way! As we are wont to do with this sort of thing, we'll be keepin' the application open and taking resumes for a few weeks, which likely means you'll be hearin' us shout about this for a bit, but that means you got a minute to "polish up" the ol' CV and/or spread the word and anyway we look forward to seeing what kind of weird stuff you decided was "resume-worthy" so send 'em on over!

Lastly, we should probably (sigh) talk about the fact that we recently made the news for the second** time*** in the past three weeks. It's a bummer of a situation, and we're not generally the "air our dirty laundry in public" type, but this all pertains to a public health issue so it's really not our place to keep mum, is it? 

Anyway. As we were about to start prepping to open on Monday, we got a call from somebody who said that they had been in our beer garden on Sunday, and that they (or somebody in their party, we're not 100% clear but also that's not an important detail) had recently tested positive for covid...

...they were seated at the table farthest from all the other tables. You know, the one that's way up in the corner on the patio and kinda bunched up over there (i.e. the one farthest from the stairs)? The "it's better than nothing" table? That one. Going from the notes we took and the information they gave us, it looks like it was a party of four that was there from about 2:30-3:30...

...once we found out what had happened, we called everybody who had been at the nearest table during/after their visit, as well as the people who sat at that table after them (several hours later, mind you). That ended up being a grand total of two or three parties (again, it's not our most sought-after table)...

...to be perfectly frank, we're confident enough in our safety measures that we don't believe anybody (staff or customers, excluding the other people at that table) would have been at risk. If you think about it, all of the safety protocols that we currently employ were put in place for exactly this reason. But since we like to get knowledge from knowledgeable people rather than our own conjecture, we sought opinions from somebody smarter than us (in this case, a doctor), who confirmed our suspicions that risk to others should be minimal (and who also pointed out that there are valid reasons why the customer in question might have had no reason to believe that they might be covid-positive)...

...but, since we pride ourselves on a) transparency, and 2) going overkill on sanitation/safety, we felt that it would be best to close for the day on Monday and scrub the everlovin' hell out of anything and everything in the beer garden/taproom (and also insist that everybody who had been working that day get tested). We also felt that it made sense to be as upfront as possible about why we closed for the day, since that's the kind of thing that we would want to know if roles were reversed... 

...and then at some point we got a call from a reporter who had heard "all over social media" that we were "forced to close for the day," which was perhaps a smidge more dramatic than we would have liked (we closed voluntarily, and as far as we know we were the only ones talking about it on social media), but the article**** that they wrote didn't sensationalize the situation, so that's really neither here nor there...

...and now we're getting a bunch of weird emails from people saying things like "I heard all your employees got covid," which is pretty much the opposite of the truth and also not making this any easier for anyone. 

So. That's the lowdown from our side of the story, and it all kinda boils down to the fact that we've been doing everything that we can to keep everybody as safe as we possibly can, but that doesn't mean it doesn't scare the bejesus out of us for a bit when that all gets put to the test.

(As a bit of a postscript, this sheds light into our thought process behind a question that we get asked often, but seldom have an answer to: "what happens when it gets cold out?" But considering how much worse this would have been if we'd all been in a poorly-ventilated, moderately-cramped room instead of outside in the sun and the breeze, you can pretty easily guess which way we're leaning on that one.)

* I was gonna say "positive" instead of "upbeat," but that seems ill-advised. 
** And third. 
*** The first time it was the Boston Business Journal, who quoted us - at some length - making fun of the governor. 
**** We still haven't seen the TV segment, but we're assuming that's also pretty straightforward. We weren't able to talk with the interviewer for that station, but that's probably in everybody's best interest, given our collective public speaking skill.