Our Store Was Bombed!

But no one was hurt. It happened sometime at night. I got to work at 6:30 this morning to find our door had been boarded up. Looking closer I saw that the bottom of the door and the wood all around it was totally charred. There were newpapers out on the road that were all charred as well (our papers that were left out from the day before). I saw a little note from the police so I called them up because I could not get into the store. After being transfered a zillion times they told me they had no record of the incident. After a half hour trying to get someone from the police who knew what was going on on one phone, and the other phone held to my ear trying to get my manager on the line, I finally got through to my manager.

Oh, yea. In the meantime our food order comes and I tell the guy we can't get into the store so we wont be able to accept the delivery just now. So (while I have 2 phones attached to my ears) he proceeds to get out and start to take the food out. I go over to him and tell him we cannot just leave the food outside because I don't know how long it will be before we can get it into the fridge. He's all confused and tries to get me to tell him what time we can take it. I am laughing because this is all just so bizarre and tell him that I just do not know when we will be able to get in because I cannot get ahold of anyone. He said, "Well, your food's gonna be late, then." I tell him it doesn't matter because I don't even know when we will be able to open.

So finally we end up going to one of the other stores and work there while we wait for maintainance to come. We are there for only 15 minutes before my manager shows up and takes us back to our store. It was a complete mess. There are stairs directly in front of our door and there was glass all the way at the top of the stairs. There was glass behind the bar and just everywhere. It smelled so bad in there, too. Maintainance guy had already cleaned most of the shattered glass in front of the door but the police say not to touch anything because they are sending an investigation team out. I had thought of that when I was first at the store, but I am not really sure why they didn't do that when they were there to board the door up.

So, I got done at 1:30 and we were still not open. We did a super-duper deep clean. We cleaned every single surface area, every mug, anything, ANYTHING that could possible have glass on it.
Oh, and of course, while the police and maintainance where there we get our food, milk, and weekly supplies order all at the same time. They were all stepping through the door where the glass was missing, bumping into eachother and stuff. And before we had glass in the door we had a baricade up but people kept stepping around the baricade and through the windowless door to get some coffee. We had to chase a lot of people away saying we were not open. These addicts are serious about there coffee!

It was interesting having to give a statement to the police. I also had to run home to get my camera for pictures.

Oh, yes. The police told us they caught the people that did it shortly after it happened. That is all I know. I hope it's the same people that cemented our locks during the G8 and bashed the same door in only 2 months ago.

Well, I tried to insert a picture, but blogger wont let me. You can see some on flickr.