I don’t think I need to explain what happened here.
Breakfast orders were taken. Saniya didi’s help was sought with the live fire part, and the rest was done by the little bear (or, to use her full name: ‘Chef Kymaia of Café Blossom, Chief Omelette Maker’). The eggs were served (by the appropriately be-aproned chef-cum-server-cum-cashier) with a side of cheese-cucumber-tomato salad & tomato ketchup (there was no toast, alas, for the café had run out of bread), and the cranberry juice was in a wine glass (classy, eh?).
Unfortunately, the guests (rather rudely) forgot to click photographs (they explained later that the food looked so delicious, they had no patience to do anything but eat it quickly). And after an inordinate wait (I think it was almost 30 minutes after the guests finished), the bill arrived, which was duly paid.
Note, if you may please, the addition of the correct GST (a calculator was used, of course) and the other touches of flowers in the logo, the little coloured hearts, and the personalised yellow sticky note, even if the template for the actual invoice was copied from Baba bear’s invoice file (including the ‘E&OE’ part!).
What’s the lesson in all this? That if you were to wonder what 5 years of hard work in creating, building, mentoring, nurturing, and finally shutting down Tasha & Girl (our jam-making company) got us, this alone could make it all well worth it. Kymaia has grown up around talk of raw material cost & profit, billing & distribution, vendor selection & funding, recruitment & training, design & marketing, and customer service & quality. That, in itself, is a massive return on our investment. What say you?
P.S: This, of course, isn’t the only thing that makes those years worth it. It is also the joy we managed to spread amongst random, unconnected people who were strangers to us, but somehow connected to us by their love for our product, on which they spent their hard-earned money, and even evangelised (once, right back at me, without realising I was one of the co-founders!). But that is a story for another time. Suffice it to say, Tasha & Girl has returned to us far more than we had invested, and most certainly, than we had imagined. This incident with Kymaia is just one of those.
