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No Train. No Life!

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Working at a hospital is stupid. You deal with a lot of dumb stuff, anyway, then you deal with so much more nonsense if you work with food there. It's not really worth it, if you take yourself or your work seriously.

For one thing, they put so much emphasis on sanitation that it's counterproductive and annoying. We have to always wear gloves. To me, it makes sense to use them when handling raw meats or mixing stuff with hands. But when you have to use them for everything, you just prolong having to change them. Most of the time you're using the same one for hours, which is unsanitary for a plethora of reasons. But to them it's sanitary, because you're wearing one and they're not watching you the entire time. When I work in normal situations, I have a sanitized bucket around to clean up constantly and wash my hands way more often than when I wear gloves, and especially more often than I change gloves.

A big example of this inaneness is this stupid nurse. First of all, I hate cooking while being exposed to the public because they comment and talk to you constantly and when you're in a rush, you've got everything in your head and they interrupt you for something stupid like, "Hey I asked for no mushrooms with that." It's not your order, dumbshit. Or, "Is that butter your putting my pancakes on?"

Me, annoyed, "Yeah." Then when handing them their order I ask, "Would you like any butter or syrup with this?"

To which the moron says, annoyingly, "I don't need butter, since you already put it on it."

All right dumbshit, stupid fuck, 99% of the restaurants and diners (which I'll go on a prejudiced limb to say it's usually shitty diners this person goes to) use this butter substitute for pancakes, unless they're doing it for health reasons. I worked at a restaurant that didn't use butter and got reviewed for having "under-seasoned eggs." All restaurants and especially diners use butter (or fake, cheaper butter substitutes) for most of their cooking for flavor, presentation, and/or results such as caramelizing. Which leads me to the morons I work with. "Hey, could you cook these onions for me?"

Me, "Sure, no problem." I dump the onions on the flattop and drizzle butter over them to started sauteeing them. Him, "You know that's butter you're putting on there, right?"

Me, "Yeah."

Him, "We use oil," and then proceeds to use way too much oil and walks away, comes back a little while later to say that whoever cooks the onions during the week always burns it. That's why you use butter, knumbnuts. Oil's got a higher smoking point, so if you're trying to caramelize them, they'll start blackening before you get to that point, hence fucking butter.

So the other week I was wiping underneath the grill, on top the cooler because of all the crumbs and oil that's been collecting there. I'm wearing gloves because I don't want to change them again. As I normally do, I push my glasses up and scratch my face USING THE BACK OF MY WRIST, NOT EVEN TOUCHING MY GLOVE.

Dumb-ass nurse says, "I saw that." I ask what and she says she saw me touch my face. I say I used the back of my wrist and didn't even touch my glove and besides, even if I did I don't use the back of my gloves to handle anything. She says, doesn't matter, may as well change them.

I just give her a look and say, "I don't use the back of my gloves for anything and I'm not even cooking I'm wiping things down," and go back to what I was doing. So this dumb bitch, while, presumably, she'd have no problem with me going from wiping things from under grill to making food, using the back of my wrist is a problem. I say this because she never said anything about me changing gloves while I was wiping under the grill, just as soon as I pushed up my glasses and wiped my face. This also bothers me because she did the same thing this past weekend.

We also have the prep-kitchen area and storage downstairs in the hospitals main kitchen. The dry-goods and freezer area is locked so you have to get the manager-on-duty to unlock it or get the key. This causes an inconvenience as they're not always there and I always stock my stations to the fullest so as not to have to run out of anything during service. The people I work with don't understand this so if I can't stock up and leave it to them, they only stock to what they think they'll need and always run out, so during a rush they have to go run around getting shit which is stupid. Because the people I work with are foreign and can't understand shit, I can't explain this to them. For instance, the MOD was not there in the morning so I couldn't stock up before we opened. When my fryer-guy came in I gave him a list of things to bring up which he ran past our manager who told him to bring up less than half what I put on there because "we probably won't be that busy." Mid-super busy shift we were down to 10 chicken strips left. I tell him that's all we have and he should get some more from downstairs. He says on weekends we're not that busy so we make things to order. I tell him that's not what I'm saying; I'm saying if we get two orders of chicken strips, we won't have enough so we need to get more back up. He doesn't. We get more orders and during the weekend rush which are sudden as they're whole families coming at once to eat, he has to go downstairs and look for the MOD to get the key and then grab more chicken strips and this happens every shift.

They, for some reason, don't understand why when I actually am able to stock to my liking, we NEVER run out of anything and at the end of the shift, we have just enough to not have to re-stock so we can just focus on cleaning up.