This place I'm currently working at is in a fine-dining restaurant. I start work at 3:00pm and finish at 10:30pm. So I came into work and started setting up my station; preparing food and ingredients. After I finished setting up my station, I would do other tasks such as preparing other things for the next day and even helping out other chefs in what they are doing. Obviously, I would also cook when orders come in.
So it's like 7:40pm and there wasn't any order to cook at the moment. I was standing still, drinking water from my tumbler. I was looking at the guests coming into the restaurant (we are an open kitchen so guests dining can see us cooking). It wasn't even like more than 5 seconds when I was drinking water and looking at the guests coming in.
But during those 5 seconds, the fucking restaurant manager walked near us, saw me and said, “Hey ______, you don't have anything to do besides just standing around?” I said, “Uh no…” And then he gave me a shocked look like he was surprised at me for 'disrespecting' him.
He said, “Well there's is always always always something to do.” I didn't want to cause a scene in front of the guests and chefs around us. So I just said, “Yeah yeah okay. I'm just drinking water.” And then he walked away.
I was talking about it to the other chefs working with me and they simply shook their heads and also said that it's stupid. They want you to be 'productive' every second, but you were doing a lot of things for several hours.
Massive brain-damage to people who has that mentality where they quickly judge something without even thinking first.