I'm doing 23 things
There is a change coming. I’ve suspected it was coming for a couple of weeks, but today it was made official. I’m being pulled off my corporate accounts and dragged kicking and screaming back into the production kitchen for the holiday season. Even better, the corporate accounts I have worked on so diligently and turned around and improved are being handed over to someone who two days ago was excoriated by a client for his slowness, laziness, lack of attention to details and general unprofessional attitude.
I worked in the production kitchen last year and it was the most gruelling and unrewarding experience I have ever had. I didn’t mind the work, it was the people. They are petty, hateful, backstabbing, vulgar,and completely uncooperative and unreceptive to new ideas or input. Any new concept brought to them is really an attack on them and an insult and they respond with vitriolic vengence. I nearly quit a dozen times last year. I nearly walked out and drove away and never came back. But I had larger goals outside of that place and hung in there, indulging in a fair amount of self-inflicted physical pain as a distraction. This year I was able to get away from those people (for the most part) and concentrate on turning around the corporate accounts. With practically no support or resources I improved the quality of food and service, standardized menus and pricing, lowered costs and raised profitability, smoothed out relations between corporate staff and clients and the acerbic kitchen staff, and achieved my larger goal, namely keep a job until I was able to buy a house. I was still often called upon to pull extra shifts and work weekends, with no extra pay or a raise or even a “thanks for your help”. Often I got the opposite, with snickering remarks about how I was taking it easy and not pulling my fair share of the workload. Whatever, it got me out of Hell’s kitchen.
Until now.
In all fairness, it is a necessary move. With the executive chef position still unfilled and the exec sous performing all those duties they are short-handed. Between people who have been fired or quit or laid off, the staff is short-handed and a great deal of work is being done by a very few people. As we enter the holiday season and production becomes very busy it is clear they need me to come back in and help, since I know systems, the staff, the menus, and the production methods. Or so we say… The year I was in the kitchen the exec sous was so intimidated by the presence of anyone in her little kingdom she actively worked to undercut and sabatoge me. I had introduced new production methods that streamlined operations and provided checks and double checks, as well as consolidated workloads and made ordering easier. When I went corporate all that was tossed out the window and they went back to the way they were doing it before, which was haphazard, unorganized, autocratic, and mistake-prone. Now it is not like coming back to a place where time has stood still, it has actually moved backwards.
Today the chef and one of the prep staff (who must have Turrets or something because he never stops talking or cussing, at high volume, all day, endlessly…) got into a screaming match over food prep. The more the argument escalated and the more high pitched the screaming got, the more I felt my head hurt and spirit wither. I walked outside and punched the concrete wall until my knuckles bled. I walked back into the kitchen and they were still shouting (now from opposite sides of the kitchen so everyone felt like they were caught in the middle), but now I had a bright shiny pain to concentrate on. It helped, but I really had hoped I wouldn’t have to go through this again. Its going to last at least 5 – 6 weeks, and I may never get my corporate accounts back. I have a couple of things I still have to do so I don’t want to quit right now, but its going to be extremely hard and demoralizing. Luckily there are knives for cutting, fire for burning, and boiling water and hot oil for scalding, and I probably won’t do any permanent damage to myself. But I have to have that endorphin-rushing stab of pure physical pain to quiet the hammering in my head that follows these moronic, pointless… I can’t even think of the words… behaviors I have to endure.
There’s no point in coming home every night (after 14 – 16 hours of hell and agony) and dumping any of this on my wife. There’s nothing she can do and it will only bring her down. There’s no point in recounting every soul sickening instance here, either. I had high hopes for this goal at one time during the year, but I think I will very soon have to mark it as “I give up” and let the robots consign it to the refuse pile of failed goals. I wanted, and I tried, to make my life more important than my job. My job, it seems, had other ideas.
