I work at a casual dining restaurant chain. I can’t specify which one exactly because on the day of my being hired I was given a debriefing on my responsibilities as an employee, and disclosing negative facts about the restaurant can get me in trouble. I’m not here to disclose negative facts, but the CEO might be browsing the internet one day and this blog post with his corporation written all over it might not rub off on him too well.
Before I purchased my motorcycle, I borrowed one of my parent’s cars to drive to work. During the debriefing I was also instructed, as an employee of the restaurant, to park behind the restaurant and not in the actual parking lot because this space was reserved for the customers. This has been the norm for the 8 months I’ve been working there. The day following my purchase of the motorcycle I asked the manager if I could park it in front where the customers are supposed to park. She said yes.
So the day starts off with parking whatever vehicle I’m driving. Employees who deal directly with the food are referred to as “Heart-of-the-House” (HOH). All HOH employees are required to wear a hat or a hairnet. We use a digital scheduling system, and I clock in by using the 3 digit code that was given to me during my employee debriefing. I’m terrible with arriving on time to things, and this is something I need to work on. Arriving early or on-time to work is a 50-50 thing for me; the managers have spoken to me several times about it, but I keep doing it. I don’t arrive late on purpose. I think it’s more of procrastinating the sequence of getting ready for work. I wait till about the last half an hour before I start doing anything.
Anyways, so I clock in and I go to this closet in the back of the restaurant that holds all the aprons. I forget I’m wearing that thing. It’s on my body for a whole 8 hour shift, I suppose it’s because I’m used to it by now, but saying something like “I wear an apron at work” sounds funny to me because it never feels like I’m wearing an apron. I put on clear gloves and start doing the job I’m about to describe to you for about five to six hours.
I’m not a cook. I’m not a server. My position is inbetween the two; some obscure position that I usually don’t like explaining to other people who ask what I do because they wrongly assume restaurants have just cooks, servers, and dishwashers inside of them. This is probably the main reason why I’m writing this.
I’m what some people call an expoditer. The cooks heat the food up; using either the grill, microwave, fryer, an industrial grade mini oven, or a large treadmill thing that slowly moves the food under a heater; and put it on a plate. Besides the entree meats, everything comes in a bag or a cup with a lid on it (if it’s a sauce). Given all this information, my reader is now imagining the plate directly from the cooks: a hot mess of bags, a cup that might as well have lava inside of it, and cooked meat.
When it’s busy, I have a silver window full of plates like the one I just described. Looking above, I see a computer screen with orders. They are not written in what normal people call english. On my first day working there, it looked like computer code to me. Maybe I had been spending too much time with my studies, but it seriously looked like something out of my computer science textbook. It turned out to be severely shortened text describing the plate that the customer ordered. To this day, I still sometimes send out wrong plates. Daily, at least five wrong plates. I’m not sure if it’s the system we use, or if it’s me. I think I’m bad at my job, but not just because of the computer system.
The servers are another entity that I have to interact with. Part of the job description is not only garnishing the food, but getting it walked to the customer promptly when it’s complete. The problem with this is that naturally, no one likes being told what to do.
Since I was little, I've had problems speaking. I don’t stutter or anything like that. My thoughts are as clear as day, and I don’t suffer from any severe mental illness. I could have a thought during a conversation, but I won’t be able to vocalize it. This barrier comes down with time, for instance, I have no trouble talking to close friends or family. I suppose everyone is like this in some way, though. We’re told to avoid strangers when we’re little. I find myself thinking what I have to say is stupid or irrelevant. Whenever I catch myself thinking about how I think, I end up clustering my head with meta-questions about thinking and socializing but in words these notions sound strange because they don’t accurately describe what goes on in my head during moments like these. The feeling of embarrassment comes on, and my ears get red and hot. I can instantly break a sweat if attention is directed to me. During these small moments where I over-think I feel anxious. I need to say something, but I cannot. I've self-diagnosed myself with social anxiety because it’s a recurring issue in my life that I haven’t been able to fix. Regular shyness is transient, so I don’t fit into that category. I don’t think it’s that severe, like I said, because I don’t hyperventilate and I don’t suffer from panic attacks. I know I’m not depressed, but I do think I have low self-esteem. I’m able to talk to people when necessary, like during an interview or to other students in a group assignment.
So I have to deal with this when I’m asking all these waiters (who are older than me) to walk the food I just prepared. Most of them are busy, and work to avoid me since they don’t want to walk another server’s food, even though that is essentially what I have to make them do when the restaurant gets busy. I have to muster up the courage and break the wall I have in my head everytime I ask one of these people to please walk the food. It’s exhausting. I admit that this job has helped me cope with my issues a bit, but everytime I need to ask them to do something, it’s breaking down a mental wall for me. The horrible part is that the walls don’t really break down. It’s wall after wall after wall after wall everyday at work and it’s why, out of the four other or so expos, I feel as if I’m the worst one. One of them is really good and he’s not afraid to yell at the waiters if they’re not walking food. I can’t do this, and I don’t think I will ever be able to. I don’t like my job.
After all the guests have left, I’m mentally exhausted from this terrible routine, and I have the job of cleaning my area. The first thing I do is remove all the dirty dishes and silverware in my area to dish. We have a designated tub for dirty dishes, in case a server doesnt have time to walk all the way to dish to leave one or two dirty plates. However, sometimes they leave them in odd spots so I have to scan my area for any miscellaneous dishes or silverware. After this is complete, I move the garnishes, sauces, and veggie dressings in my station from their stainless steel containers to plastic ones we’re able to wrap and store in the fridge. I repeat this process with the salad bar, which has a lot more stainless steel containers with various salad fixings in them. I also have to make ice baths in these white tubs where we store our soups, chowders, and melted butter in, and I have to trasnport these tubs into the freezer. The salad bar keeps its containers cold with underlying icewater, so I have to drain the water, and use a bucket to scoop the fifty or so pounds of ice out of the salad bar and into a large trashbin which I roll to the back and empty into a designated drain area. I then fill this empty trashbin with hot water and soap, near the brim. While it’s filling, I grab a towel (which I used to call ‘rag’ but my manager told me that ‘rag’ sounds too dirty and to instead use the word ‘towel’) and start wiping down the countertops. If a sauce sits too long it can get caked on, so I have to put nail into several spots on the counter top and salad bar to make sure they’re spotless. I go back to my area and sweep the floor. I roll the bin with water to my area once it’s done filling, and with a smaller bucket begin the process of evenly distributing the soapy water across the floor. I grab a scrubber on a stick and scrub the floor. Then I use a squeegee on a stick and push all the soapy water into the two or so drains. Once everything in my area is tidy, I have to make a setup for the morning person, which is just a few measuring spoons, spatulas and tongs.
But it doesn’t end there. I have to go help dish close. I have to carry all the clean dishes to their proper place in the kitchen. China is heavy, especially when it’s stacked in 10s or 20s. And it’s a restaurant, so we don’t have fifty or so china plates. We have hundreds. Varying in size of course, a lot of them are small circles, some are medium sized, some are perfect squares for deserts, some are large platters. The thing is there are a lot of them. After carrying all the dishes (meanwhile the dish guy is washing the remaining ones) I start cleaning the floor again. The floor in dish gets imaginably more filthy than my floor, since food is being sprayed off the plates. It’s a smaller area, however, so I’m able to do it quicker. If I don’t already have gloves on, I put some on and I have to clean the drain by hand.
I wash the skin off my hands and then I clock out. Thanks for reading about my boring and laborious job, I might quit soon but I still need cashflow so I might as well keep it.
