All Play and No Work

I put on my black and white pinstripe pants, white t-shirt, and begin to button the buttons on my white chef coat. I make sure my green sharpie, black pen, and Disney issued name tag are ready to go in my knife kit. All my hair gets pushed back into a bun, ensuring no hair falls out later on in the night. The clock reads 2:00 p.m. Time to go. I grab my hat and my knife kit and fly out the door to my friends car and we zoom off to work. By 2:20 I'm rushing through the doors and swiping my time card, all the while taking a glance towards the doors to see the sun one last time for the day. Up the stairs I go, eager to start my day and see my co-workers as if I didn't see them 16 hours ago. Pre-meal starts promptly at 2:30, followed by two hours of prep. I've been assigned the same station every day since I started six days ago. Working in the pantry isn't the funnest job, but it helps me finesse the plate into a piece of art and build up my speed when the waiters slam us with orders all at once. It feels good to have my knife back in my hands as I cut strawberries into 1/8" cubes and remember how precise I have to be with my cuts in the world of fine dining. The clock now reads 4:30 p.m. Time for break.

We all head down the stairs to the cafeteria and get some snacks. I made the mistake of high-fiving one of the dishwashers on my first day and now I have to give him a high-five everyday during break. Luckily, I'm not the only one who he insists on high-fiving. At 5:15 it's time to get back to work. We finish prepping the station and continue to do so until the first ticket inches out of the machine, eager to be read and quickly filled. I grab the desired plate and begin making a salad or a cheese plate. By the end of the night I've done enough salads for a small army, but practice makes perfect and people need to be fed. The middle of service can get a little crazy as one person throws together a salad as the other plates a dessert and tries to fill the ticket as fast as they can, often doing more than one at once. The work isn't hard, but standing on my feet can be tiring and the stress of filling the ticket for a table of 12 in six minutes or less takes it toll too. My station is often the first to send out orders and the last as well. We're scheduled every night until an hour after closing and some nights we're still filling tickets after that. The station gets cleaned and we all say our goodbyes in the parking lot until tomorrow when we come back to do it all over again.

If there is anything I have learned, it's that the eight hours of work I've been doing isn't really work. I have too much fun during every second that I am there to think otherwise and the people I work with feel the same way. I hear them say a lot that the pay is horrible, but they love it so they keep doing it. No amount of school can ever teach me that.