20. Huge Mess
I manage a coffee shop lunch place. A young girl came in fresh out of culinary school and had previous coffee shop experience. What could go wrong, right? On the first day, I had her shadow the other employees just to get a hang of the POS system and the general flow of the store.
Nope, customers overwhelmed her, and she liked to hide in the back, leaning on the ice machine. Fine. Whatever. She said she loved baking earlier on, so I sent her to the kitchen to make some cookies.
I’m super chill, and I didn’t even care what kind. As long as they were freaking awesome and delicious, she had creative control. She comes out sometime later, admitting she doesn’t know how to make cookies and needs help.
Now I’m getting bloody frustrated. As we moved into the lunch rush, a wave of customers flooded the front of the house, and I was needed. I had 40 liters of soup in the back needing a titch more roux and asked her to thicken it a tad before serving.
Surely she could handle that, soups and sauces being addressed in the first bloody week of the culinary school she apparently attended (I attended the same program, by the way).
Nope.
She found a box of cornstarch and dumped the whole box in. Dry. Soup destroyed. Her shift ended shortly afterward. Turns out I forgot to get her contact information at the beginning of the shift, so I had to message her on Facebook, telling her not to bother ever returning.
Classy, I know, but she was just one huge bloody mess I couldn’t even begin to fix.