It's a tough thing. I get up at six thirty, have coffee and check my e-mail and twitter. I watch the morning news to see about traffic. Then I drive the 12 miles to work on the Parkway. The drive is pleasant enough: it's not Chicago or San Fran traffic, it's a straight shot and there is rarely gridlock or even a slowdown. I listen to NPR (to and from work.It's the only time I hear the radio; I don't have one in my room. I keep meaning to get one) so that makes it go too fast...
When I get to work I have to steel myself before entering. Unless my buddy the cook is outside smoking, then I get to jabber jaw with him and go in the back door, avoiding all the usual 'good mornings' which I prefer to ignore (and that's not taken too well here in the South).
I walk in and try to scurry to the back where I put up my backpack and coat. And then, even if I'm fifteen minutes early like I usually am, I get to work, because without fail, there is a load of dishes and pans and pots to wash. I have no where to set them in order to do them later in the day, everything pretty much either has to sit on the floor at my feet or be done right away, so mostly I do it right away.
Next stop: coffee. The coffee is truly bad and weak, so I drink it like water all day long. It's the only thing I trust to drink; since I have no proper bottle brush to clean the neck of the ice tea urn with, nor do the coke machine nozzles get cleaned on a regular basis and I've seen mold on both ... I do trust the milk and the orange juice, but I keep forgetting to bring a sports bottle to put some in. If I put it in a cup, it WILL get spilled.All over.
So I have coffee in my travel mug and then I start my prep as I get caught up on the dishes: I have to make a tub of salad and I have to make hamburger patties and I have to figure out how to do both at the same time sometimes without contaminating the salad with the meat: and that means I have to get creative because we only have the very little prep table space.
There are boxes to throw away (apparently the servers are ALWAYS too busy to break down their empty boxes), supplies to put away (the boss, also too busy to put away stuff he buys at the store so he piles it all up on the table or whatever surface is handy).
There is always a full bus tub to exchange for an empty one. That sounds easy enough, but... it's not. One of the servers is unable to inform me when her bus tub is full and then lets it overflow. I get upset, I say something to her and she gets all defensive and says that she is more busy than I am and working harder than I am, at which point I tell her "Don't talk to me" and I roll my eyes at the cook, who is making punching motions with his fists.
We always get lots of orders for chopped steak whenever I don't have any prepped up; so quite often I have to stop and make up some eight ounce patties: I'd make some up ahead of time but everytime I have done that in the past they've gone bad, so boss says no making them up ahead of time. and so it goes.
The cook yells back that he needs some biscuits and I put a tray of frozen biscuits in the oven: if there is room I set them on a rack. If the oven is full, the biscuits go on top of whatever else is in there.
There are certain customers that want their biscuits 'BURNT'. AT which point I have to go get three already cooked biscuits out of the steamer, and bring them back to the oven, and set them in there, usually on top of something else (the broccoli casserole, or the beef brisket, or the baked potatoes)...we'll have all kinds of crap cookin in that oven and keep stuffing stuff in there.
It starts getting hot in there so I open the back door: at which point leaves start blowing in and swirling around and I joke about having to rake the yard later.
My boss had been given a bouquet of flowers that included some cattails, and he letf it sitting on his shelf for months and months. He dropped the dead bouquet on the floor, and the cattail burst open. So now there is all that cattail fluff on the office floor, and the leaves mix in and it all swirls around with some cigarette ash and plastic cigarette pack wrappers and other boss detritus.
I live in fear that the cattail fluff will find a way out into the kitchen.
My boss smokes. A lot. He sits in his tiny unventilated office and smokes one after the other. The smoke wafts out to me as I stand prepping food so I turn on the fan if it's too cold to open the door.
That works okay, until one of the waitresses (I usually would call them servers but this is the south. Everyone calls them waitresses) joins the boss and then I have to open the door, cold or not.
One day boss and I had a battle: he was in his office and smoking away ; I opened the door. He was cold so he said "I'm going to shut this door for a minute, ok?" But: he left it closed for two hours. I opened it then, and he shut it again the moment my back was turned.
I gave up, but when he left I was so happy to be free of the smoke. Since then if I open the door when he's smoking too much he just closes the smoke in with him by shutting the door, which keeps him warm and me from gagging too much.
Usually on Fridays, when we are in the middle of our biggest rush of the day and the place is SRO, the egg man comes in with his 6 cartons of eggs. (Each box holds 15 dozen).(I know that because there are 3 of those boxes in my room, ready for moving day.) Egg man wheels in his eggs and lays them on the floor (:P) next to the cash register. We won't get around to putting them away for hours: it's just too busy. And putting them away.. sounds easy? NO.
First: we have to remove the old cardboard box that is sitting on the bottom of the cooler. It is there to absorb the condensation from the cooling unit. We take out the old one and then we have to squeegee out the cup or so of water in the bottom. Then we have to empty one of the new boxes of eggs, set them aside, take the box and break it down and set it in the cooler. Then we take the eggs out of the boxes, one flat at a time, and set them one atop the other in stacks.
Then we break all the boxes down and take them and the empty cardboard flats out to the dumpster... which grieves me. I wish we recycled them. I know there is, somewhere, a budding rockstar who needs those cardboard flats to line the walls of his garage.
The cook yells that he needs a flat of bacon. I go back to the fridge and pull out some hamburger chubs (long tubes of hamburger, they're all sitting on top of the bacon box) and set the chubs on the prep table, pull out the bacon box, set that on top of the chubs. Then I get one flat of bacon out of the box and carry it out to the cook, hoping he has the time to lift out the nearly empty flat and set it on top of the new one for me (and open the drawer for me as well, you need two hands to carry a flat of bacon. You really don't want to drop that.) I then go back and put the bacon box back in the fridge and then the chubs.
Well.. so... about that time the coffee guy comes by and he's pretty big, too big to be standing behind the counter in a busy busy diner, let me tell ya. I try to work around him while he stands waiting for the coffee order and/or his check. And of course, he's going to be parked in front of the dumpster when the dumpster guy pulls up in his huge truck, and sits there, arms crossed, glaring at me while I hold up a finger signifying "one moment, please" then I run inside to get the coffee man out of the way. When people park in front of our dumpster, and they do it a LOT, I get pretty anxious. I KNOW the damn dumpster guy is going to pull up, and usually he does. I've been pretty lucky, I'm usually outside on my way to the laundry room...
Ah, yes, laundry. While all that is going on I'm doing laundry. Which consists of first dragging the very heavy bucket of detergent over to the motel laundry room. Which only has one washer working right now because the other one busted during the freeze. One day I walked out to do laundry and there was a river of water running across the parking lot: the laundry room hoses had frozen and busted open. One machine never did recover.
Wait, actually, first I have to go to the register and see if there are any quarters. If there are no quarters in the cash register, I have to get ten dollars out and put that where the quarters are and take ten bucks in quarters to put in the register. Then I take out 2.25 in quarters. THEN I lug the soap and bleach over to the laundry room and put it all in and start the machine and let it fill a bit.
THEN I drag over the (usually) moldy, oily,greasy kitchen towels (TOTALLY IGNORING the sign over the dryers that say DO NOT DRY OILY OR GREASY RAGS or CLOTHING, MAY RESULT IN FIRE) and put them in the machine. I'm glad I'm not allergic to mold like my mom, I'd be in trouble.
I put five scoops of soap in the machine and a half a bottle of bleach... and hope it kills whatever is living on the towels.
Sometime later I finally remember to go put the towels in the dryer, and when I have done that I wipe out the washer. It usually has a huge ring of greasy scum around the drum, and lots of eggshells on the bottom. Gross. I am so glad I'm not washing my clothes in that machine. I feel so sorry for the hapless motel guests.
Once done with the towels I lug them back and throw them on the shelf in the bag hoping for time to fold them. I never do find extra time to do that, nor is there a place to do that until after we close. I can sit down and watch TV with closed captioning and fold towels then, before I mop.
My boss does get a food delivery from the local restaurant supply but most of the time he's off to Walmart or Sams' Club. When he returns from shopping, we go out to his car and unload it and carry that stuff back to the diner. There IS a cart we could use: BUT... the parking lot by the door is so messed up: from the dumpster guy's huge truck. The asphalt has two huge dips in it where his truck sinks in the hot summer. You could use the cart if you had the muscles to pull it over the ruts: which we do, but... it seems easier to make multiple trips for some reason. Plus the cart holds my bus tubs. If you take the cart, suddenly bus tubs start appearing on the floor. He said he was getting another cart, but really, where would we put it? In the storeroom? There is in the storeroom already an old grill, an old waffle iron, a wet-vac we have to keep around in case we get a flood (?), a garden hose that is not coiled, a propane tank and the rack for it...There's old pots with broken handles thrown on top of the hose.
no room for another cart.
Well... I stay busy. To say the least. I don't mind staying busy and I don't mind back-breaking fast paced work. What I do mind is the constant McGuyvering of everything, always flying by the seat of your pants, nothing is ever the same twice, always trying to figure out where to put something, trying to find something, trying to get past someone or fix something or answer a question only the boss knows, but he's not answering his phone.
Someone called today to sell something to our boss. The cook answered the phone.
I heard him saying "Oh, um, this is a pretty small place. There ain't no bosses or nothing like that in here."
Well, that sums it up nicely.
2 comments:
mmm bacon ;)
I use to be the cleaner for a bar - did the bathrooms, vacummed, washed tables, whatever needed doing. Then washed dishes, and did some prep cook work though the lunch rush. I didn't have as long a day as you, nor the back breaking work. (had my stint of that when I worked at the fish plant) But this post of yours reminded me of those days.
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