Oh man so I have had the dumbest most difficult week that has resulted in my dragging myself home actually panting with exhaustion every single day.
I work in a small, very busy coffee shop with two other full time staff. Phil and I alternate between making the coffee and waiting tables, and Jon cooks the food. It's a really tight neat little operation, we all get along fantastic and days at work are usually extremely fun.
Last Friday Jon didn't show up for work at 7am like he normally does, and I was left outside for half an hour until Phil could come open up. It's always really tricky when Jon doesn't come, because the only person we have to do fill-in shifts is a Brazilian girl named Clarissa who does a couple of afternoon shifts every week, and helps us clean up at close. She has two other jobs and also studies English part-time so it's really difficult to get a hold of her outside her normal shifts.
So anyway, Phil and I soldier on as best we can and it's absolutely exhausting. I don't much like doing the cooking at work because it has to be so fast and perfect and it's hot and greasy and pretty gross and we don't have much in the way of a docket system, just sort of yell out at each other when someone orders. As much as I don't like the cooking, though, I am pretty good at it since I've been working full time food and bev since 2003.
The week continues on, so long and awful and Jon is so terrible at communicating. Yes, he is sick, but he has been sick with alarming regularity these past few months, and always has several days off at a time. We try to call him and only ever get text messages back saying 'Yeah I'll be at work tomorrow.' The first couple of days he text messages Phil at 6am to say he isn't coming, which is useless because a text message at 6am is no way going to wake Phil up. These past few days he hasn't even bothered to contact us at all aside from one text message yesterday afternoon saying he would show up, he's so sorry, see you tomorrow guys.
Come 7am this morning, no-show.
Phil takes charge. We devise a battle strategy. As much as we and the customers love Jon, he is going to lose his job for screwing us over so much. Phil and I will work extended hours and Clarissa is going to move to full-time and we'll train her as the cook. I get shop keys and a pay rise and responsibility for all the stock and also most of Clari's training.
We realise as the breakfast rush hits that maybe letting Clari cook is a bad, bad thing. She doesn't know much English and it's hard to understand her thick (gorgeous) accent. She doesn't know ANY food safety, is completely haphazard with the orders, has no system for getting the sandwiches ready and misunderstands even the simplest things. She'll turn around and do dishes instead of getting a second order ready, and doesn't clean up after herself on the bench where the customers can see. She doesn't tell us when we get coffee orders, lets food burn or undercooks it, lets hot food go cold and cold food go hot, leaves things out on the counters. She is terrible at cutting our lovely loaves of sourdough and rye bread and wastes more of it than she actually uses. She gets angry when we try to help her and stubbornly does things her own way again after we correct her. Her plated food looks awful and every sandwich and salad is a different crazy size. She'll pre-prepare bunches of food and then not use it.
This morning we realized that the orders of takeaway vegemite sourdough she was sending out all morning were actually just vegemite spread thickly, nutella-like, onto toast, with no butter. Phil just about vomited when he found out, and we had an actual Vegemite Application Tutorial and made her eat it.
We soldier on.
I hope this works out and none of us end up killing each other.
In any case it is going to be fun if Jon ever turns up for work again.
Anyway: This weekend marks my great-grandmother's 100th birthday party (exciting) and also my boyfriend's going-away party. There will be about seven hours of driving between them!
I am terribly horribly sad but also excited because, yay, parties. I bought a dress to wear and everything.
