| 6/9/2006 Today at work was a pretty good day: it wasn't too busy at breakfast, the lunchtime tip was £6-pretty substantial, we could leave quite early and the weather today was lovely-but no doubt annoying for anyone wearing either a blazer or a school uniform. So wouldn't you be surprised to learn I broke down and cried earlier? I've been dropping an awful lot of things while working: tea cups, plates, wine glasses. Sometimes they just fall off the overloaded tray. Charlie warned me my record was getting pretty bad, but through my tears he told me to not worry and said it was just a mental record, not an official one. (He didn't say that in so little words.) For one thing he pointed out the obvious: I overload my trays. (For the last month I've only overloaded the trays with breakfast leftovers, everything else I can properly regulate.) The second thing is that I don't hold them properly, which causes the overloaded tray to sway. That I didn't know. So now I know to always hold a tray with one arm under and to leave a few things behind. I also did my first ever Breakfast-Dinner shift yesterday. Debra told me at my interview I would be given as little of those as possible and with my last day approaching, I couldn't help wonder if I could get away with doing none. It's quite odd; you come in 7am and leave between 10:30 and 11, then come back between 18:30 and 19:00 and continue working 'till 11pm (if you're lucky, I've heard on a busy night like Saturday people don't finish 'till midnight). At 22:30 my eyes felt droopy and at the time I was clearing tables and laying them for breakfast. At 11 we were prevented from going home by-at first-the fact we'd run out of tea cups. Then Greg found some more. Then we ran out of tea spoons. There were none in the restaurant, none in banqueting and none in the kitchen. Mustapha opened up the secret stash. The tip for the night was just £2.85-quite pitiful, but by that time I didn't care. I was also completely unperturbed by the parking ticket. You see, Mum thought it would be better if I drove in the evening so that as soon as work finished I could go off straight home and go to bed. I didn't know the rules for staff parking so Mum thought it would be safer to park in a side road-for some reason I believed her and I had my own disillusion about it being easier to get out of there and finding my way back home. It was a funny place that demanded pay and display 24hours (very unusual) and the max limit was 2 hours. I was running late so I didn't want to waste time paying (plus I thought I could escape the ticket inspector again-it was late after all) and I thought it wouldn't do since the car would be parked there for 4 hours. But it seems if I had paid for the ticket then I would've gotten away with it (I only got 1 ticket issued within the 2 hours I parked). If paid within 14 days I only pay 50 of the £100 fine-I thought it was okay since I can pay for it myself (Dad thought it outrageously high) but what annoyed me was the fact that the ticket doesn't say where to pay it. Anyway, got to sleep sometime before midnight and I found it a bit strange that I felt completely fine even though I got little more than 5:30 mins sleep. Although Agnieszka (Ag-ni-eshka-she's Polish) told me she once went home after a late shift and couldn't get to sleep, so she ironed her skirt, shirt and even apron. She didn't get much sleep that night. |