I am the assistant manager at an Irish theme pub. It’s a busy Friday night and everything is going well. I decide to order pizza for myself and the rest of the staff, as we’ve all been on shift for quite a while and it’s starting to quieten down enough for us to relax slightly before we close.
Just after I get off the phone, there is a tremendous sound of smashing glass from the lower bar. I stick my head around the corner to see a huge hole now in one of our massive plate glass windows that face the street. The customers who are in the bar are all looking shocked, and some are covered in glass, so I quickly work out that somebody broke it from the outside in, so a coworker and I run out into the street to try and find the culprit.
I follow a trail of blood across the street and find a middle-aged couple, both pretty drunk. The woman has huge gashes in her arm from where it went through the window, and she is bleeding pretty heavily. I quickly send my coworker back to the bar to grab a roll of paper towels to hold the poor woman’s arm together while I ring an ambulance.
The whole time, the woman is saying she’s fine and that she just wants to go back to her hotel, despite the fact she has an arterial bleed pulsing out of her forearm. The man says nothing at all, apart from offering me a cigarette.
After a long wait, a mobile paramedic turns up and starts asking questions, not actually helping that much, while his colleague watches. All this time, I am still trying to keep this drunk woman’s arm from falling apart.
Eventually, he rings for an actual ambulance, and I suddenly feel a very insistent tap on my shoulder.
I turn, keeping my grip on the woman’s arm, to see a pizza delivery guy trying to hand me a stack of pizzas. It turns out he’d gone into the bar to drop them off, and apparently insisted on giving them to the name on the order. When the other staff had told him where I was, he’d come out to find me.
When I tell him to go back to the bar and that they will pay him from the till, he just keeps repeating the total price at me and trying to balance the pizzas on my already rather occupied arms. Finally, the other paramedic takes over holding the woman’s arm together, and I have my hands free. The pizza guy dumps the stack of pizzas into my blood-covered arms, takes some money off my coworker who has come out to help, and leaves without a word. That leaves me covered in blood, tired, not a little annoyed, and holding five large pizzas in the middle of the road at midnight on a Friday night.
We later discovered that the woman had got into an argument with her husband while walking past our pub, tried to punch him in the face, and missed, putting her fist through the window.
