Thursday, April 21, 2005

Fingerlickin bad

Today my station has been hijacked by Julian. This annoys me because the boss told me that unless I set up and run the station I will be sacked. So I inform Boss that J's presence is preventing me from preventing myself from getting fired. He ignores me. I have a feeling this is company management policy - I have seen it so often, not just towards me.

The other thing is that J seems quite ambitious and loves to proselytise his knowledge of everything wagamama. So I know I am in for a day of learning new egg sucking techniques. Predictably enough he orders me to do the worst job in the kitchen - flouring, egging and breadcrumbing semi-defrosted, foul smelling battery farmed chicken breasts. Fortunately I have worked out a technique for reducing the time needed to complete this task by about 75%, so even though I don't see it as my mission to trail-blaze efficient working techniques, this is a case of needs must.

I think J is a little disconcerted when I announce that I have coated 15 kilos of breasts in a quarter of the usual time expected, and of course he can't help but point out the minor imperfections. I used to think that if they could not find fault with your work they would invariably complain that it was not quick enough, but this time I have silenced my leader.

My "punishment" for completing the assignment early is to do the most dangerous job in the kitchen. This involves cutting away the inner flesh of peppers before making wafer slices to produce a salad garnish. The problem with this task is that it is difficult not to hold your hand in the path of the knife, so I am always a little wary of this. Still, I manage to complete the task without injury, but again I must have been too quick as J then tells me he wants another three cutting, which I find hard to believe as I have prepared enough already for about 200 salads.

Looking back the only way I can rationalise what happened next was that the combination of absurd supervision and the conflicting order to carry out these tasks without supervision made me so I angry I did not concentrate properly. I somehow managed to chop away the tip of my little finger, leaving the slice of flesh complete with the nail on the chopping board.

The usual procedures then went into place (no bandages available so I had to use a napkin). The manager had little choice but send me off for medical assistance, but insisted I go to a local doctor - presumably to keep the incident unrecorded in the health and safety logs. Not surprisingly the surgery forwarded me to A&E without even looking at the would, and after short wait I had a largish bandage as a sling to hold the finger up. Suitably dramatic I thought!

Maybe it was unreasonable to expect tea and sympathy on my return, but I appreciated a joke from one of the other chefs asking me if I had had a further accident that could explain the sling. Otherwise I sensed that all the managers were actually pretty angry about what I had done. I guess they resented the paperwork it created, and probably were pissed they had one less person to exploit that day.

The boss explained that I would be going on to SSP from that day, even though I had by now already "worked" over half my shift. He told me this was limited to £69 per week, which for anyone working full time on a decent wage would be pretty devastating, but for me it was only £10 less than my current wage, so I was not too upset.

Foolishly I managed to get my sling tangled with the uniform I placed in the laundry bin which is locked, so I had to go round all the managers to find one with a key that was willing to open it. When I found this man he claimed to be busy cooking and so kept me waiting 20 minutes during which time I was shouted at 3 times by different managers for loitering without purpose. One of them gave me this daggered look as if I had mortally upset her, which I thought unnecessary but consistent with the way that these simpletons get a bit too emotionally involved in their shit jobs.

In any case I was sent home without lunch, and told that the rota manager would call me to check when I would be fit to return - something I suspect they will deny - see next entry!..

Monday, April 11, 2005

New head chef threatens dismissal

Yesterday a new chef appeared and demanded my name. It was not till today when he called me out I discovered he is the new chief, although there are still two layers of management both above and below him. In a way it was nice to be able to discuss "career development" such as there is, but there were a couple of things he said that left an unsavoury taste. Firstly he told me that although he had not had a chance to evaluate my performance personally, he expected me to run the whole station from start to finish - which is actually what I have been trying to do from the start - but that if I did not do this then he would not hesitate to sack me.

This means that my job depends on the intermediate levels of management allowing me to do what I wanted to do if I am to keep this job, and I suspect that they will not give me much chance. For example today I was allowed to set up the station while the poisonous dwarf who normally runs the ramen station I am interested in was told to do my usual job which is easily the worst in the kitchen: coating semi-defrosted chicken breasts in egg, flour and panko. However after whinging about the job, and spending the entire morning completing ( I would have been given about half that time), she used her charms to get out of the prep area into the kitchen while I somehow got demoted back to prep.

The second grievance was that he alluded to negative reports from my previous managers. When I asked for an example he chose one that I could least relate to: that I forgot how to do stuff and had to be reminded. The problem is not so much remembering how to carry out menial tasks as the fact that every sous chef and chef has their own way of doing stuff and tend to impose this on you if it is not their way. I guess the root problem is that there is no manual for these tasks, but since there is no opportunity to raise this issue there is not much I can do. So much for the kaizen culture they claim to have adopted.

The great irony is that every time I get threatened with dismissal - and this is pretty frequent - is that this is actually a very attractive option for me. Not only are there many other similar jobs around, but they pay much more and I suspect they would come with much less disrespect. In any case I will soldier on and see if they will really carry out their threats. Perhaps they will if they can find a replacement, and rather ominously I saw a new hire arrive as my shift was completed.