I recently was hired at a local bakery to work front of house counter and additionally hired on to do back of house administrative work, such an ideal situation! Front of house was going to be 17 hours a week while the administrative work would have been 15-20 hours a week. This bakery offered health insurance at 30 hours a week so I really felt like I hit the jackpot. Everything started off great! I was scheduled to train with the operations person for two three hour days just to go over the basics. I already was familiar with the systems they used as I have about 5 years of restaurant management experience and 7 years of hospitality experience and made that clear in my initial interview, but as we know every business runs things a little differently so I was asking a lot of questions just to make sure I would mess anything up on the back end. Here was what the operations role was to entail:
- Create a menu to post on Instagram stories daily
- Post the menu on Instagram by 7 am
- Update bakery pars based on what was sent in closing and opening pars sent to me
- Open online ordering by 8 am
- Close special orders by 2 pm
- Text head baker any special orders placed that day
All very simple but mess one thing up and the operations for that day could really get thrown off so I was feeling a bit of pressure after just 6 hours of training. I received paper instructions for these tasks and was told that I was going to run the show the next day but could contact my trainer with any and all questions as I was still training. She did let me know not to call or text the opening manager as she was too busy in the morning to answer questions.
That next morning I had all of my alarms set for my deadlines and started working right at 6 am from my home computer. I texted my trainer a few times with little questions just to confirm I was doing everything correctly and even sent my Instagram post to her to double check before I posted. She okayed it all and I was on my way! Pars were in and orders were opened by 7:50 am. I got a call later that afternoon from one of the owners asking how I felt about everything and I honestly felt pretty confident so our conversation was short. She did let me know that the Instagram post didn’t have the correct opacity and that it was somehow erased from the template, I explained I used mobile so there was a possibility something didn’t transfer over and that I would use a desktop from that point forward to avoid further issues. It was then brought to my attention that pars needed to be updated in the system by 7 am, 7:30 at the latest, I was never told this deadline by the person training me but it was apparently a big deal it wasn’t posted by then due to it causing panic in the opening manager. I apologized and explained I was told to get everything done by 8 am and that moving forward it would be posted at 7 AM instead. (The bakery didn’t open until 8 am so nothing was messed up on the ordering side, just spooked the manager a bit.)
After my phone call I messaged my trainer about the opacity issue in my post. I double checked what I did wrong just to make sure it didn’t happen again. I obviously shouldn’t have done this. Later in the day I got ANOTHER call from the owner firing me from the administrative position for these reasons:
- It was a red flag that I was asking so many questions to my trainer as it came across that I was not as experienced as previously discussed
- It was a red flag that I caused panic in the manager for not having the orders up by 8 even though it was never communicated with me to do so
- The owner wasn’t confident she could continue training me because she was too busy
- I wasn’t a good enough communicator since I should have called the morning manager
Note this was after 6 HOURS OF TOTAL TRAINING AND TWO LOUSY DOCUMENTS. During the 5 days I was employed by this company the front of house manager tried to cut my house from 17 to 14 hours a week, some of the administrative tasks were being delegated to other employees, and I was fired after making two minor mistakes.
I know at the end I dodged a bullet with this job but hearing “we can’t find any good workers” after this experience makes me want to scream.