#42 – Dry dock
Posted on February 1, 2011 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comic
There are always surprises when you start a new job. It rarely turns out exactly how you imagined. The biggest surprises for me were usually in food service. I was always amazed at what actually happened in the kitchen of a restaurant. The five second rule is real when you don’t have to eat the food yourself. What was your biggest new job surprised.
Tags: cats, pirates
“Captain, unless we figure out a way to fill the oceans with milk, we can’t see why you should remain the captain of the ship.”
“Meow.”
“He’s got you there.”
My biggest surprise was at my school-arranged work experience, in a restaurant. I was basically supposed to be the ‘menial tasks slave’, so I anticipated doing nothing but wash dishes all day.
But the restaurant had this industrial strength dishwasher. Dishes go in, pull down lid, hold 5 seconds, dishes are clean. It was incredible. And I, the mere slave, actually did get to cook things etc.
Yeah those machines were crazy!
Having a telescoping camera tower that you count on every day suddenly snap a cable and come plummeting down is the reason I nearly suffered a heart attack one time at work.
Earlier in that job timeline, I discovered that the coach I used to sweat under isn’t such a hardass as a boss. Pleasant surprise, ho!
By the 3rd day of my job in public works, I realized I was the only one in the breakroom that wore a suit.
My first job at a movie theater had lots of unpleasant surprises, mostly relating to cleanliness and how little management valued it. There was mold in the fountain drink nozzles because they never let us really clean them. It was pretty nasty. I won’t ever go back to that theater again.
As for good surprises, I was VERY pleasantly surprised to learn that Barnes & Nobles employees are allowed to borrow books from the store to read. We were only supposed to borrow hardcovers with removable dust jackets, so if we didn’t have that edition of a book in stock, an imaginary customer would just happen to order it and then forget to pick it up.
Doing dishes is something I truly hate with a vengeance. I had to do dishes in high school when I had kitchen duties. My other duty was to break down the cardboard boxes that the food came in.
My favorite new job surprise was giving out free samples. No one wants free samples. Especially when the company wants you to microwave red potatoes and get 180 samples out of 8 potatoes.
What, at like a grocery store? I love free samples there and frequently purchase stuff I’ve sampled.
Once upon a time I was offered a free sample of Reggae Reggae Chicken Pasty… I promptly bought one, and before the end of the day bought another. I bought one almost every other day, though sometimes I gave up on balancing the books and had one every day or even two in one day. Unfortunately they no longer have them there and I don’t know of anyone that does.
i too work at a movie theater. i can completely agree with Jesso on some things. i love how sometimes managers will look past things like “the filter for the fryers has been broken for 2 months” (unfortunately true at my job), but other times will make you wait a half hour to be checked to go home, and make you scrub the counter again because you missed a microscopic spec of food.
I am disturbed that there are restaurants out there that blatantly disregard health standards like that. I work at a fast food joint myself, and can proudly say Not one employee there would DARE serve food off the floor, or undercooked, or that was expired in any way.
I actually have trouble eating out at other places now, but am Glad that I know I and my fellow workers would never serve food we wouldn’t eat.
The biggest surprise i’ve gotten at a new job was when everyone other than the manager walked out or was fired… an hour before my first shift. So not only did i have to start off working 12 hours a day on my own (it’s a 24 hour store) for a week and a half untill we got new staff but the training was basically “This is what needs to be done, figure it out”
Oh c’mon cats just LOVE the water.
New job surprise–I was brought overseas for six months at great expense to find that the prime contractor, over the course of that six months, only had about two weeks of work for me. I learned that big multinationals probably have no idea how much money they are burning. I loved living in Belgium, and DuPont is still in business, so I guess it all worked out well. I also wrote two cool applications of my own design while I was there, one of which dramatically improved the whole process we were doing and the other of which was also a huge improvement but got me reprimanded because it was technically someone else’s job to take care of that problem–and he was like a co-founder of the prime contractor company :). So I was surprised in that case by how much trouble you can get in for doing a really good job at something no one asked you to do.