Picture a corporate CEO’s worst nightmare, and I don’t mean Democrats raising corporate tax rates. Instead, a completely unorganized company where favoritism and personal connections play a greater role than one’s accountability and experience. A place where the managers slack so much employees don’t know their schedule until the day before they work, making it near impossible to plan. 

Like most restaurants, this establishment runs like a car, and a car cannot run when it has a missing part.  The kitchen, and the cooks inside it, serve as the fuel source. For what would a car be without a fuel and a restaurant without food? Customers are always complaining of over priced food, yet isn’t everyone always complaining about the high cost of gas as well? 

Outside the kitchen, servers scurry around. Pressured by complaints and requests from customers, shouts from the kitchen, and demands from hosts and managers, the gears in their heads are constantly spiralling. The weight of the entire restaurant is forced onto the petite shoulders of the 20 year old waitresses. 

The hosts, like myself, pave the path of the restaurant. We steer the server’s in the direction of the tables we sit, we steer the delivery drivers to the houses of the customers whose orders we take, and we keep the kitchen on track. We are in charge of maneuvering around obstacles. When your server is nowhere to be found who do you complain to? The hosts. When the delivery driver is late who do you call? The hosts. When you picked up a pizza with one half pepperoni and the other half sausage and get home to realize the pepperoni and sausage is on both halves, who do you call? The hosts. When an obstacle jumps in the way of a car your first instinct is to grab the steering wheel and steer yourself to safety. We correct back to the smoothed pavement as the tires slip off and onto the crunchy gravel. 

 The trashed tables are left to the responsibility of the hosts and bussers. The bussers are supposed to dash around the restaurant cleaning up every mess, from the crystallized apple juice stains to the grease soaked napkins. Instead the lethargic fifteen year olds can be found leaning against the wall with their eyes fixed on their phones, while the hosts scour the tables. There’s also the proactive bussers, who insert themselves in every situation and are under everyone’s feet. They are the windshield wipers of your vehicle, who are responsible for cleaning the windshield so you can use the car, yet often times it becomes more distracting to drive with them on. Windshield wipers struggle during heavy downpours, as our inexperienced high school bussers struggle to handle the insane dinner rush. 

The entire structure of this restaurant isn’t as organized as a car. Lacking a running engine, your car is useless. With managers who spend more time complaining about work than actually working, it is a struggle for the restaurant to run. Instead of monthly schedules, they are released once a week, as last minute as possible. They don’t consider your personal planning, only their own. The drama here is absolutely ridiculous. To start, the employees here are the strangest group I’ve ever worked with. They could make up a cast of a reality TV show: the depressed and suicidal chef who screams at other staff until they are in tears and then spends his time off the clock drinking at the bar until the early hours of the morning when the owner has to drive him home, or  Shelby, the hostess who spit in another hostess’s ear for talking to the boy in the kitchen she liked, or Jackie, one thirty year old hostess amongst the other seventeen year old hostesses, a struggling alcoholic single mother of two who psychotically stalks her boyfriend. The most frustrating though are the employees with personal connections to the owner. They know they can’t be fired, so they spend their shifts glued to their phones and coaxing the managers into letting them leave early. 

As disorganized and messy as the restaurant business can be, I really don’t think customers give enough credit to all the employees, who all must overcome their personal issues for their eight hour shifts, to work together and be a team for the good of the restaurant.