So, here’s the deal: I get to “audition” for the job.
I met today with my Executive Director and a representative from corporate. Effective immediately, I am officially the Acting Dining Services Manager, with all of the authority and responsibility that entails. And now I have 30 days to show that I can manage the kitchen and whip the staff into shape. If I can do that, the job is mine.
So the pressure is on. As I’ve previously mentioned, I have no actual management experience or training, so I’m going to be flying by the seat of my pants and improvising a lot in order to prove myself. I fear I am going to have to become, or at least appear to become a hardass.
Unfortunately, this comes at a time when two of my adult waitstaff are leaving, and two of my high school girl servers on the night shift are leaving, and I have a handful of new recruits. But, perhaps that’s not so unfortunate. I’m “losing” the bad habits of the outgoing staff, and I can try to get these new people on the ball from the beginning.
I also need to get my other cook motivated to start focusing on getting certain cleaning tasks done, and documenting temperatures (the state oversight people for retirement/nursing homes require this documentation). He’s a good cook, and hardworking, but … shit isn’t getting done.
I think one of the first things I’m going to do is ban cell phones from the kitchen. Require them to be left in the kitchen office while people are on the clock. Work is not getting done when people are texting. We had the same rule at my previous job (at the convention center), and it worked well. Although at the convention center, the rule only applied to servers, because one thing you don’t want during a fancy banquet is servers’ cell phones going off.
I’m also looking at a potentially awkward problem: the recently-departed kitchen manager hired a developmentally-disabled (Down Syndrome, I think, but cannot confirm) woman (24 years old) to work as a server. She only works the dinner shift, as she seems to be still in high school. I’ve only worked with her one day a week, when, under my previous schedule, I worked the dinner shift on Sundays (the rest of the week I worked the morning shift). But I have noticed that she is easily distracted and does not work very quickly. I’ve also encountered a problem with her, when I have given her instruction on how to perform a task: She says, “I know.” Well, erm, I wouldn’t have been giving her the instruction if it was clear that “she knew” how to do it. She also insists that she has completed a task when it’s plainly obvious that she hasn’t.
Now, I have been friends with a good number of developmentally-disabled people over the years, and I’m pretty good at talking to them. I treat them and talk to them like I would anybody else, with minor adjustments here and there to accommodate their limitations (Like not cracking a joke that requires the ability to recognize a pun or clever wordplay. I used to know a married couple who were both developmentally disabled, and on one occasion, as we parted ways, I said to the man, “May all of your children have wealthy parents.” It went right over his head, of course, and he pointed to his wife and said, “Oh, she can’t have kids.” [his wife was old enough to have been born back when they were still sterilizing “retarded” girls … they’ve stopped doing that, haven’t they?]).
When I first moved to this town, when I was 17, one of my first friends was the developmentally-disabled man who lived across the street. He was about ten years older than me, but he graduated high school only three years ahead of me. But he was fascinating to talk to. He loved Spider-Man, and he loved Native American history/culture (specifically, Sioux). He had those two main areas of interest, and I suppose you could call him an “idiot savant”, because he could tell you, accurately and in detail, anything you wanted to know about them. A few years after I met him, I was in a bar and met a Sioux couple. The wife turned out to be the official storyteller of her tribal group. I told her about Larre (pronounced “Larry”) and some of the things he had told me — factoids I had never heard before — and she confirmed that he was exactly right.
Anyway, this young woman is part of the “problem” that I have to solve, because she isn’t doing what needs to be done, and I really do not look forward to having to be the asshole who fired the retarded girl. But she is one of the main reasons that I think I need to ban the carrying of cell phones while on duty. She receives texts (she has a smartphone! I can’t even afford a smartphone!), and immediately drops everything to answer the text, and it takes her a good while to enter her reply. And she’s not getting work done while she’s replying. So I’m going to try to figure out what she can do well, and focus her in that direction, and give her all of the encouragement she needs.
I’m also going to ask my Executive Director to speak to my staff and inform them that I am in charge, and WHAT I SAY GOES, no questions asked. I am also going to speak to the manager in charge of the caregivers, because the caregivers do some meal serving, and they need to know that, when they are working as servers and they are in my kitchen, they follow my rules and instructions. On the rare occasions that I need to enter the caregivers’ main workspace, I observe the rules of their “territory”, and they need to do the same when they’re in mine.
It also turns out that I misjudged that “corporate nurse” who was complaining about the cleanliness of the kitchen. It seems that her first husband was a fancy chef, and she and he owned a fancy restaurant. So she really does know what she’s talking about. Although her definition of “filthy” is far broader than my own. I’ve never cooked in a “fancy” restaurant, and that is one of the difficulties I’m having with recognizing what she and other corporate people see as “filthy”. I look around the kitchen and think things look remarkably clean compared to some of the kitchens I’ve worked in. And I speak from the fact that there has never been a reported case of food poisoning at any restaurant where I’ve cooked, while I was cooking there. But, dammit, there is a list of things that I have to make sure are spotless, and I’m going to have to ride herd on people to get that shit done.
Also, this corporate rep asked me how much I was getting paid, and I told her “$11.75/hr”, and she authorized a $1/hr raise, effective tomorrow. So now I’m at $12.75/hr. Not too bad of a raise, given that this company likes to hand out 25-cent raises like those are impressive (attention corporate: 25 cents was insulting 30 years ago).
