The start of the summer is classic silly-season in the papers. Particularly once the leaving cert is over, and the 20 or so daily stories about Jemima Puddleduck and her woeful Biology exam have been run and re-run to death, there’s a delightful lull as everyone goes on holidays and nobody is left to run the country (badly), or apparently commit any truly newsworthy crimes (nonsense I’d say, but anyhoo…)
The other result of exam season being over, is an influx of new employees into mostly service industries such as restaurants, bars and shops. For the first few weeks, this means lots of untrained staff who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. And it’s no fun to watch.
I drink coffee before work most mornings. Because frankly, without it, I would fall asleep at my desk (and not necessarily because of being tired, though that does tend to be a factor given the prevalence of chronic insomnia in my life!).
On Wednesday morning I arrived at my usual place of coffee-consumption, to be greeted by a new staff member. She’s about 18, and gormless as anything. It doesn’t help that there were only three people on : One supervisor, one relatively new member of staff who was at that 40+ age of returning to a job that was designed for people with less intelligence and for that matter less dignity and thus seems somewhat out of place, and this new girl. To say that the supervisor looked highly strung would methinks be fair.
It’s all too obvious when someone has never used a till before, especially at 8am when faced with caffeine-starved “professional” types busy hurrying themselves to work and in no mood to be delayed. It is equally easy to assess a person’s skill and/or experience with a coffee machine (and yes, trust me, there’s skill involved), and under the same conditions one person incapable of doing either should surely never be doing both.
It was always going to be a disaster. The supervisor, or ‘only one in the building with any idea of how things were meant to work’, was trying to make most of the coffees in the hope that customers wouldn’t complain about the standard of it or the speed at which it was made. Good decision. From that vantage point she could see what her other staff members were (or in this case weren’t) doing, correct them, and attempt to charm the customers with her bleached follicles and equally bleached dentals!
Poor little-miss-summer-job. She had short fingers, which didn’t help matters, and I don’t know if it was a lack of training or a lack of basic common sense but she seemed to be doing things all-at-once while simultaneously doing them in entirely the wrong order. Her supervisor looked close to a nervous breakdown and frankly their colleague looked like she was planning her new patio furniture.
As the week progressed, I would love to say that things improved, but alas they did not. I don’t like to be harsh but if I was the supervisor little-miss-summer-job would be looking elsewhere by this afternoon.
It’s the problem with in-at-the-deep-end style work. You either sink, or swim, but if you’re stranded mid-water still gasping for air three days later, it’s probably time to give up…
