When your Best Isn't Good Enough

My 100th post, everybody! Woot Woot!!!

Last night I had the pleasure of having a trainee working with me at petro can during my graveyard shift.

Now inside, I'm thinking "Woot Woot, Im gonna be able to stock the cooler and sleep for the next 8 hours!!!"

Alas that was not even close to the case...

Perhaps I should start at the beginning.

A month and a half ago (aproximate 42 days ago) our boss hired two new people, in the knowledge that we would be having a few of the long term employees leave, as well as myself as I go back to school for the fall...

these two new people were hired to do graveyard, well not specifically, but they were hired to be trained to do graveyard so that they could fill in for graveyard if needed...

And as such they have been training with heather on how baking works, what tasks need to be completed during the graveyard shift, etc etc etc...

The girl I was working with has had no less than 3 evenings training with Heather... And for those of you who dont know, heather is a superwroman in regards to teaching and efficiency... The amount of stuff she can get done in a night is baffeling...

So needless to say, my plans of having an easy night were pretty much set in stone…

When she arrived, I had her go to the cooler and collect the baking supplies while I served customers… She claimed she didn’t know where any of the supplies were…

Oh Shit! I’m thinking… I remind her where the baking freezer is, where the tray you put the baking supplies onto is, and send her on her way… Whilst serving the myriad of customers that had entered our store…

She comes back, and I ask her to wait a second, and then show her how to dismantle the coffee pots to thoroughly clean the interior… She looks at me like I’m an idiot… So I tell her that this is something that gets done once a week, and since Heather does pretty much everything else, we sanitize the pots every week… (please note that we sanitize the pots each night with bleach and water, it is just one night a week where we unscrew the entire contraption to scrub with soap and water… Our coffee is perfectly safe)

So after showing her the process, I tried to have her repeat it… Which was no problem… She could take it apart and put it back together in just a few short minutes… Its was the process of cleaning that worried me… She must have spent a good 25 minutes scrubbing the insides of one pot… Which is an exceptional amount of time… I have no problems with being thorough… but you have 90 minutes in order to clean 8 pots…

I tried to be polite, I was all like “Deary, there’s no problem with being thorough, but it shouldn’t be at the cost of being efficient”

I think she got the message because she cleaned the rest of the pots in an hour… unfortunately there were too many customers for me to watch her quality… But I’ll assume that it was fine… Maybe I wouldn’t recommend drinking coffee this week… wait till next week after the other graveyard person has a chance to sanitize them…

Our next little obstacle was baking… I send her to get the baking rack, complete with all the goodies she will be baking for the night… She returns and asks:

“What do I do?”

My jaw dropped slightly…

“You put them on baking pans”

“Where are they?”

At this point I feel the need to remind you that this is, at the very least, her fourth graveyard shift…

And she didn’t know where the goddamned baking pans were…

“On the baking pan rack… in the baking area… beside the oven”

Those were said sequentially… I figured the first one would be sufficient… But I added the second when she looked at me like I was crazy (“we don’t have a baking pan rack, silly”) and the third was added when the second location was given and answered with an even more confused look (“And I’m sure we don’t have a baking area, silly”)

I pointed frantically, in case she didn’t figure it out… but she did (thank god)…

“Now what do I do?”

“put baking paper on the pans…”

“baking paper?”

“yes… the silicon baking paper!”

“What silicon baking paper”

“the silicon baking paper you put on the pans”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about”

At this point I walked over to the baking area, ripped out a sheet of silicon paper from its dispenser and slapped it down on one of the baking trays, and walked back to the customers I should have been serving…

“Oh! Parchment paper!” she says…

Sure, she knows the fucking technical term… but if you describe it while shes standing to a huge box of it, she doesn’t know what you’re fucking talking about…

Now the fun starts… originally I was going to let her serve customers and do the baking so she could get the handle of it… Which is really the hardest part of the graveyard shift… making sure that you get the baking done in any amount of time, while customers aren’t waiting in lines at the counter…

That was shot down very quickly, as it took her 55 minutes to put the baking on trays (should take about 5 minutes)

I was baffled beyond belief… I have no idea how it could take someone that long… I mean you transfer from a tray to a pan… and put the pan on the rack… repeat nine more times…

So now I’ve resolved to serve customers while she does the baking…

It takes her 3 hours and 40 minutes to do the baking (yes 220 minutes)… She was waiting for items to come out of the oven before she started working on the next batch…

I tried oh so desperately to encourage her to get things done a little more quickly “I don’t mean to be a bother, but you still have a lot more things to do [so stop stuffing your face with candies!]”

I may not have added the part in [ ]…

Towards the mid way point, I was thinking to myself “she’s still going to be doing dishes when the morning shift comes in”

I was almost right… She finished the dishes by around 5am… 5 hours after she started the baking… Not doing anything else… just baking…

I was pulling out my hair… I was smoking… I was shaking from pure annoyance… but I had to do my very best not to make it known to her that I was stressing out at her complete lack of competence because I didn’t want to make her cry…

And guess what the best part is… Today I get to do it all over again!!! Yay!!!

I hope it goes ten times better… Cuz otherwise the morning crew is going to find me hanging from the pipes in the walk in cooler…