Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Correlation, Not Causation

I’m not normally a superstitious person, but I am superstitious when it comes to the food service industry. Of course, there are so many ways to be miserable working at a restaurant, that of course I’m going to start drawing parallels where they probably don’t belong. I thought it’d be interesting, though, to go down the list of some of the more prominent jinxes, even just as an observational exercise.

Whenever a screen breaks, we get busy immediately after. This used to be more general, a sort of “When you spend time fixing something, that’s not time helping customers” sort of idea, which then leads to a back-up on the line and a miserable me. But in this more specific case, there have been a number of times when the system we’ve been using to keep track of orders just freezes up. Every time that’s happened, at least ten new people come in and we have to start tracking orders by hand. And that never turns out good for anybody.

Whatever we’re already low on (for whatever reason), we’re going to get an intense demand for the rest of the meal period. I mean, this one seems obvious, right? If we’re in a position that we’re low on something, it either means someone screwed up in prep (not an unlikely situation, to be honest) or the item’s in high demand. Meatballs are the most notable here, as it’s really easy to run out of servable ones and it takes forever to heat up more.

Never ever ever say that we’re probably going to be slow that shift. That just invites trouble. The worst part is that this is normally said before our normal rush periods, so the promise is even more hollow than it seems. Fortunately for this one, people have started catching on and calling each other on this. It doesn’t help, but it’s a good step forward.

Catering orders are the devil. They really just are. It’s a lot of food for some faceless individual over the internet, and sometimes if the order’s big enough, they even have a manager (and it’s always a manager, they’re the only staff allowed) deliver it to them. So not only are we down someone who could help out on the line or serve or take orders, but it seems every time we start making one of these orders, five new orders come in.

So… yeah! Those are the big ones, the ones that come up again and again. As the title implies, I know that these are just coincidences. Like, there are probably times I just don’t think about when stuff like this doesn’t happen despite an inciting incident, and I don’t notice those times, but when you’re so busy trying to make sure everyone gets their food in any time close to reasonable, you don’t really think about those times.

-F

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