owning restaurants while you're on vacation

We laid out in the warm September sun, clear blue skies overhead, soaking up every moment of our annual “big” vacation. In this context “big” means more than a few days and a 6+ hour flight. I asked Chris if he wanted to swim in Lake Garda once more before we headed back to the room to process payroll. We jumped in, letting the surge of cold water refresh us before we paddled back and forth along the coastline a couple of times. I joked “this is why we work so hard, so we get to do this three days out of the year”. The night before we had met friends for dinner nearby at Villa Feltrinelli where Mussolini spent his final years under house arrest, allegedly sneaking out to see his mistress on another part of the lake. We were luxuriating in juicy Italian bliss.

We had left our phones in the room, presuming that no emergency could be so immediate that we needed to have them right next to us. Being that we were six and nine hours ahead respectively, business related messages tended to creep in around lunchtime. When we got back to the room Chris opened a video of a toilet overflowing with shit water. I texted our drain guy (love you, Joe) and told him about the emergency. I opened a message from a different location that the internet was totally out and Spectrum would not make a service call because we were using a third party router and the signal was fine on their end. Easy— I DoorDashed a new router to Brooklyn. The FDNY had popped by another location which is not really cause for concern but it could result in a surprise violation and accompanying fees because of something like paperwork not being mounted to the wall– you never really know!

Then came the worst news of the hour, a thread we were both on that we had received certified mail containing a lawsuit and eviction papers from a landlord. The suit has since been dropped. It was a scare tactic used to intimidate us because they could likely rent the space for a higher amount and we’ve got years left on the lease. We always pay our bills on time and we have awesome in house counsel so even though we knew everything would turn