I’m a trained cook but took a job as a waitress this summer to shake things up a bit. The restaurant I work at is seasonal ((summer months only) which is fairly common for most places in my hometown. We aren’t the fanciest place in town but you get a good amount of food for a decent price. The menu is mainly burgers, sandwiches, fry chicken, fried fish and fries. Most of my coworkers are really young which can be a pain sometimes but over all they are good workers. The big issue we have is one of our cooks, Betty (fake name). Betty is an 80 year old woman who has worked in kitchens for over 50 years. She is a stubborn old bat who complains about everything. Here is a list of some of the issues she has with us/we have with her:
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she never reads the tickets properly so ordered get made wrong. She then blames it on us for not writing the tickets in clear detail.
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she won’t wash any dishes but complains about not having enough spoons or bowls to use. The wait staff can’t always manage the front and do dishes at the same time. Sometimes when the morning wait staff comes in there will be a massive pile of dirty pots and pans laying around because she feels it isn’t her job to clean.
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She blames the poor tips she gets on the wait staff even though she always have 1 or 2 plates of her food sent back every shift.
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she leaves early on the night shift because she’s “too old to clean”.
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she can’t stand on her feet for more than 3 hours at a time so half way through her shift she sits down even if there is orders to make.
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she gets mad at people who are not happy with the wait time but won’t fix her speed.
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she’s highly inefficient and will only do 1 ticket at a time. If a ticket comes in with more than 3 orders she will take forever because she won’t multitask.
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She NEVER washes her hands.
I know some of you are probably thinking “why not fire her and get a new cook?” We tried that but it’s so late in the season that all of the available cooks have jobs. So we are stuck with her. We are all sick of working with Betty.
Edit: A couple people have brought up that she probably needs the job to get by dispite being 80. I didn’t think to add this info to the original post but she has admitted that she doesn’t actually need the money due to her husbands big pension cheques. I don’t know how accurate that is but I can only take her word for it.