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.
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.
ReplyDeleteWhen 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. =)
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.
ReplyDeleteI 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. :)