March 15, 2012

Being Marcy

The school where the FarmHands attend and I work on occasion, is a part of a county wide school district.  There's only one other school in the entire district, though.  It's a k-12 in the town where Husband works (about 20 minutes south of us).  Since I'm subbing for the entire district, I can be called into either school.  Tuesday of this week was the first time I've been asked to work at the K-12 building.

I didn't like it.

OK, I guess I should expand on that.  I didn't like it Tuesday.  Since then, it's been fine.

First of all, every time I've worked at the FarmHands' school I've known the night before that I was going to work.  Tuesday I got a call at 6 am asking if I could be there as close to 7 am as possible.  Rushed shower,  thrown on clothes, super fast/simple make-up, not quite all the way done blow dry, and grab a pop tart as I'm running out the door is not the way I like to start my day.  Then I spent the next 7 hours working in an unfamiliar kitchen with unfamiliar people doing an unfamiliar task (they have a salad bar & ala carte bar because of the high school).  Top that of with a particular co-worker who was making me 18 kinds of crazy and it was not a good day.

Much to my chagrin, the head cook asked if I could work again Thursday and the Monday and Tuesday of the next week.  I reluctantly said yes (but kept the reluctance entirely to myself).  This is the lady who will decide how much & where I work.  Don't want to get on her bad side.

At 6:30 Wednesday morning she called again.  Could I work 10 to 2 that day?  Yeah.  Sure.  Love to.  Groan.

Much to my surprise and delight, I enjoyed myself Wednesday.  I was separated from the particular co-worker and found out I'm not alone in my deep seated irritation when ever she's around.  Because of the minor amount of familiarity, today went much better, too.   Happily, I do like working there now.  I'll be happy to get back to my small kitchen and small school, but it's no longer an unwelcome change.

This is a much larger school so instead of there only being 2 of us, there are 5 for most of the day & 2 more come in shortly before lunch.  Since I'm the newbie, I get to make salads- a simple task.  But the person I've been replacing is not the salad girl.  Today the break down went something like this:  I was Marcy.  Marcy was Missy.  Missy was Sherry.  Sherry was gone & I was taking her place.  Oh, and Tara was gone too so Tanya was Tara.  At least I wasn't the only one seriously confused.  Everyone had trouble remembering who they were supposed to be today.

I was happy to get off work and just be FarmWife again.  But the bosco sticks weren't bad.

2 comments:

Inkling said...

I remember working in a camp kitchen for a couple of days just weeks after I got married while the hubby was on a mountaineering trip with a few campers. The head cook was a t.o.t.a.l. grouch. The assistant cook gave me a job to do (washing lettuce), and the head cook came in and ripped it out of my hands and said, "I pay good money to buy pre-washed lettuce. You are wasting my time. And you probably don't know how to cut it either." I wanted to cry, but gutted it out. To this day, I still cut my lettuce the way he taught me.

When you write these posts about your new work, I can't help but picture you in 50's style clothing with red lipstick, a hair net, and glasses like Granny's from that era. If you ever write a book about your exploits in the school cafeteria, you must have that be the front cover artwork. =)

FarmWife said...

Inkling, that is horrible. I do not understand why people think that type of behavior is unacceptable. Mine was nothing like that...much more like the having sand in your bathing suit kind of irritating.

I really need a blue collared dress, white apron, hair net, red lipstick, cat eye glasses and a giant spatula to wear to work...unfortunately that would be against the white/khaki pants dress code. :)