I’ve been working weekends for the better part of 2022 at my hotel. It’s been a lot this past summer, if I’m being honest. I’ve spent the whole summer either trudging through weekends solo “because we’re understaffed” or trying to train new employees how to do the job while also trying to do my own. It’s a fast paced, high stress environment that has made me question my sanity on more than a few occasions. I kind of rock it though? The guests seem to love me at least, if the customer feedback is anything to go by. I’m a bit of a ham and enjoy performing for them at the front desk, telling them about the town, whipping out jokes to get them laughing, and making recommendations to make sure they have a good time while they’re in town with us.
This seems to have caused a point of contention that, until last night, was going completely over my head. Now, I have recognized that our restaurant gets pretty slammed on the weekends. It makes sense because we have a very convenient location for guests to get a pretty good meal. I talk up the items on our new menu when I tell guests about the restaurant as part of my required schpeel at the front desk. Admittedly, I’m only *required* to tell guests the hours and fill them in on how any credits they might have work in the restaurant but I like going the extra mile, not because I’m trying to make a sale but because I have a meal here every shift I work and I think that we have genuinely good food so I want our guests to enjoy that while they’re here. Our french fries are one of my favorite things on the menu and I like to joke with guests that we have the best french fries in town before admitting that I’m almost criminally bias on the matter but they really *are* my favorite. We also have a ravioli dish on our new menu that is just amazing and a bisque that's just.. but anyway, I digress.
So, yeah, I talk up the restaurant, give guests the tidbits on my favorite menu items, then make a point of telling them the names of our servers and chefs working that evening and talking them up individually a bit because we get a small bonus each time we’re mentioned positively by name in a review. So really, more than anything, I’m trying to sell my coworkers and give them a fair shake at that bonus since they don’t get as much face time with the guests to get their names out there. I do the same thing with pre-introducing whoever will be doing our overnight shift at the front desk, putting a name to the face that the guests may or may not ever even need to see.
I do realize that the busy nights can stress the chefs out. I mean, it’s kind of ridiculous for us to be as consistently busy as we are and have just one person struggling to make all of those dishes and do all that cleanup by themselves. There *should* be at least two people on the busy weekend dinner shifts. I feel like I work pretty well with the one chef. He’ll tell me point blank if he needs me to explain restrictions(out of stock of something, kitchen equipment isn’t working, we just don’t have the staff to accommodate, etc) to guests. For example, I’ve started warning guests that the restaurant’s “last call” is 9:30/9:45pm just to try to help them avoid people showing up at 9:58 looking to feed a family of four. I'm happy to accommodate these requests to make his shift run smoother.
I thought I had the same relationship with the other chefs as well, which was why I was completely caught off guard last night when one of the servers scolded me and my co-worker for “promoting the restaurant too hard”, because several families that we had checked in over the course of several hours all decided to come down and get their meals around the same time. She more or less said that if we didn’t get our meals for the evening because the single chef the hotel had scheduled to work a sold out Saturday evening couldn’t keep up with a couple of families in the restaurant at once, it was our own fault for “promoting the restaurant so hard” and, I’ll be honest, that ticked me right off. It’s not like I told them to come down at any one particular time. I gave them the same schpeel I give everyone and sent them on their way. The free meal is also like… one of the few benefits the hotel provides and when you work eight hours with no breaks or access to outside food… you're kind of relying on that.
I certainly didn't think that it was right to have us working at the front desk for eight hours with no breaks and no meals. This has been a point of contention a couple of times between myself and management, but I did kind of tone down my raving reviews about the menu items and stuck with just giving the restaurant hours.
Apparently, that wasn’t good enough, because a few more people wound up coming down for dinner as the evening went on and the server returned to address it again. She said that we/I’ve been doing this all summer apparently and went on to say that there have been nights when one chef that just left for college would be in the back quietly cursing my name for “pushing” the restaurant and her having more orders to fill than she could handle on her own. Now, on one hand, I feel absolutely *horrible* about this. I would *never* intentionally set up a coworker to endure anything that would push them to tears. I appreciate *knowing* that this is how people I’m working with feel about me instead of assuming that everything is great while they silently loath me.
But… on the other hand… what the fudge? How is it *my* fault that we have a steady/average streams of guests ordering at the restaurant on weekends when our entire hotel is sold out? How is it *my* fault that our hotel’s entire budget operates on keeping us perpetually understaffed and forcing employees to pull a workload that *should* be spread out over multiple people?? They’ve all been sold on the delusion that it’s because “people are lazy and still getting big bucks on unemployment” rather than acknowledging the reality that they pay poverty wages, offer no benefits, no sense of stability, and force you to do it all on your own because “oops, nobody wants to work, so there’s just not enough people to give hours to”.
There are a great many things that I love about this job but being forced to man the front desk alone while also being the “on call” housekeeper/maintenance person on a busy weekend night is not one of them. Being *blamed* for making a coworker’s job harder just because I’m doing my job well is a pretty shitty feeling to boot. So I just needed to vent about that. This has been my Ted Talk.
p.s. The chef was able to finish all the meals, including ours, a few minutes before the restaurant closed so we did at least get to take our meals home. I'm not opposed to our meals being pushed back in favor of serving guests but I did take issue with the implication that I was at fault for potentially not getting a meal because I was doing my job and not because our employers are too cheap to pay for the hotel to be properly staffed.