The Stabroek Business had met the two long-standing Charlestown Secondary School friends, Donella Long and Mariah Baker, late last year when their then thriving Professional Waiter Service enterprise with the catchy trading name of The Balance was establishing itself as a classy waiter service. They were beginning to establish themselves as an inventive, hard-working team of young women and increasingly, Donella and Mariah and members of their team were turning up at well-attended public functions, adding their own classy touch to those occasions. Donella and Moriah, like everyone else, never saw COVID-19 beginning to bestir itself to take the world by storm so that they too have had to deal with its horrendous impact.
The Balance is an enterprise that derives its patronage from public functions where the size of the gatherings determine how well the business fares. When we spoke with Daniella early this week, her altogether unsurprising story was that COVID-19 had brought the The Balance to a shuddering halt. The dictates of social distancing and more specifically the rigorous strictures that now attend the staging of public events have reduced the enterprise to living within the limits of regulations which they find almost impossible to endure.
Tough, Donella says, is a sedate understatement of the shock that COVID-19 has inflicted on the two partners and the several dozens of mostly part-time staff who could rely on the company for jobs from time to time. These days they spend much of their time working on strategies that allow them to offer their services within the limits of the social distancing regulations. That position is unlikely to change, Donella says, pointing out that they have been compelled to turn down a number of assignments which, in their assessment, transgress social distancing restrictions.
The company’s primary concern, Donella says, has to be for the well-being of the people who perform waiter services for them. They understand only too well the disastrous consequences that any miscalculation that falls outside the realm of the strictures could have for the company’s reputation and conceivably its future.
No pessimist by disposition, Donella, nonetheless, is an enduring realist. She begins by accepting that in the first instance, concrete plans for a re-start of business cannot be made in the shadow of the idiosyncratic behaviour of a virus which, elsewhere in the world have shocked people with its tendency to ‘double back’ on those who thought that it might have come and gone. So that The Balance has taken a position of taking the calls and listening to the requests of its various potential customers, and afterwards, setting the assignments that it is asked to handle against the strictures set out by the authorities. If there is no ‘fit,’ they politely decline to do the job.
Seemingly a woman with a strong entrepreneurial proclivities, Donella has meanwhile, been turning her attention to other likely business pursuits which she says are likely to find some measure of traction in the local market. She makes the point, however, that The Balance’s current priority is keeping its services going therefore the company continues to be open to enquiries, but insists on making the call with regard to whether or not they will accept the assignment. “It’s up to the rules rather than up to us,” Donella says.
Donella Long and Mariah Baker can be reached on telephone numbers 693-5762 and 689-0891, respectively.
