Even though I've worn my braces for over a year, I am still getting sores from monthly tightening, sometimes I will be fine and the soreness will only last for about half a day, other times it will kick in a few days later and last for days like the last one which I am still feeling now.

Good news is that I have completed all the monthly payments for my braces, so I no longer do I have to ask my parents for $300 every month to pay for the braces... now I can just ask them for money to buy things I need that really do matter.. like my McDelivery bill among other things.

Lately I have also found a new job at a pastry kitchen, and this time, it's a central kitchen that does only pastry related items. My problems with the current workplace is pretty clear in the last few posts.

Which is why I have decided to give myself, maximum, a 6 months probation period of sorts for my career in the pastry world before deciding if it's really something I want to do professionally or just allow it to stay as a hobby.

Annoyed

There's a saying that goes.... "The souffle doesn't wait for the customer, the customer waits for the souffle."



Well fuck my life because all I have been doing in the pastry kitchen is make souffles for customers, pancakes are suppose to be the main item but for some reason the souffles are selling out even faster... and what's worse is that everyone always orders the chocolate souffle, the one that's the most time consuming to make because for some reason, rather than using cocoa powder or have a chocolate premix prepared before hand, I have to melt the chocolate in the microwave in burst mode, which essentially means I am stuck at the microwave for a minute, taking out the chocolate every 10 seconds to stir it up so it melts properly before popping it back into the microwave.




We have 3 different flavours of souffles to make, vanilla, matcha and chocolate, arranged from easiest to make to "fuck you for ordering this".




It sounds easy at first, when I was first briefed on the items to make, since all I really have to do is incorporate a portion meringue into the premix base.  The only problem is the pastry kitchen is SEVERELY low on manpower, so all they have in the pastry kitchen is me, on a weekend, serving the weekend dinner crowd. It's so bad that the kitchen management had to send one culinary cook from the hot kitchen into the pastry kitchen to help me out.




Having one and a half pastry cooks in a kitchen preparing 3 different types of souffles, handling 3 different type of pancake orders and preparing a mix of other desserts under half an hour per customer that were flowing in like the hoover dam just broke is fucking impossible, the boss doesn't think so, because he kept rushing me like some fucking loan shark.



Boss:"Is souffle for table 3 ready?"


Me: "No, that's still going to take a while. I'm still preparing orders for the other tables before.... I will start on his.....(gets interrupted midway)"


Boss: "How long? can you hurry up, customer has been waiting for a very long time."  *annoyed and extremely impatient tone*



Hurry up? Hurry what up? The baking time? Are you dense? I'm already in the kitchen working my ass off, the last thing I need is someone coming in to rush me to "hurry up" , what do you think I've been doing this whole time? Sitting on the floor and drinking Tequila? I don't even have time to stop and drink a cup of water and you want me to "Hurry Up".

So what do you want me to do?  Prioritize his order so the customers before him can stay in the restaurant and await their orders for an extra hour, because the last few orders were literally served an hour after they were ordered.

Fuck off, if you want the customer to not wait so long, maybe you should step up your game and come in to help out the pastry side like the managers do instead of standing outside acting all high and mighty just because you are the boss. Fucked up, don't want the customers to wait then hire more fucking pastry cook instead of pushing the only one you have to the limit, or limit the number of customers entering the shop to accommodate your current lack of kitchen workers. And he kept coming in and interrupting my work flow, asking me to prepare this while I am in the middle of preparing something else.



You may be the boss of the restaurant but you are not the head chef of the kitchen, so unless you have some constructive criticism... you should just keep quiet and let me do my shit while you go apologize to the customer and just ask them to wait or cancel the order because it's overwhelming the shit out of me.




Even the chef trainer isn't pushing me to churn out orders faster, instead she is telling me to relax, do my orders as per normal and let the waiters tell the customers to wait a while longer. That's the difference between someone who knows how the kitchen works and someone who thinks he knows how the kitchen works....fucking ignorant,  even the waiters themselves can feel the tension in the pastry kitchen so I don't know how the boss can be so oblivious to the stress level I am at that he keeps adding it on. I almost had an anxiety attack, my hands were literally shaking and I didn't even realize how bad it was until one of the waiters pointed it out to me.




The thought of quitting has officially entered my mind yesterday after the attitude I received from the boss. I know kitchen work is tough, but this is not just tough, this is severely low on manpower, my initial schedule was to only work in the mornings and not on weekends, but because the chef trainer was having a hard time with the scheduling, I decided to just agree to her putting me on 3 consecutive shift that will have the highest number of customers dining in since she has been generally quite nice to me, and this is the thanks I get from the boss.




This is the last time I am going to work on a weekend, at this point I wouldn't even care if they fire me. All it takes is one person to ruin my whole work experience and today it was from the boss himself. I can now understand why the other full time pastry cook left.... not only under staff but also under appreciated by the boss.





One other reason I don't really respect the boss was because I have found out recently all the menu items served in his restaurants is a direct copy of the menu items served in another restaurant located in Plaza Singapura. The one in Plaza Singapura opened in 2012 and the one I am working in opened it's first branch in Malaysia in 2013.



I was actually trying to convince myself that it is just a coincidence in the beginning, but if you have to try so hard and convince yourself that is is, it probably isn't. I didn't want to point it out at first because the people I have been working with have been nice... to a certain extent, but I really didn't appreciate the boss attitude today so fuck it. There's definitely a case of plagiarism going on here.

Bad Time Management

I went to work yesterday, thinking it couldn't get any worse than what it was like last weekend.... I was wrong.




Apparently the restaurant management decided to have this promotion for the entire freaking week where they are giving away a free plate of pancake to the customers if they were to spend a minimum amount at the restaurant, which if you are going in a group of 2 or 3, it's an amount that you will definitely hit. I found that to be an extremely horrible idea because we are SEVERELY LOW on manpower in the pastry kitchen, at the end of last night, someone from the hot kitchen had to come to my side to help me along with one of the managers.... we needed 3 people just to get the orders out and they weren't even on time, both who came to help were shocked at the amount of orders that were constantly pouring in.




The boss on the other hand has stopped pushing the pastry kitchen so hard, so that was one good thing. He was still rushing me a little, but at least he was nice about it, like the waiters.




Today, I decided that instead of waiting for the orders to come in and then prepare them, I should do a big batch of the desserts first. Initially, it was pretty successful, customers were getting their orders within minutes, the waiters were all rushing to my side to grab the orders because I was getting the desserts out really quickly and everything was going well, my hot kitchen cook who decided to help me midway was also a bit shocked at how quickly I was completing the orders, that was UNTIL my Chef Trainer decided to come to the restaurant to visit on her off day and switch on anal mode.


My Chef Trainer is a bit strict but she has generally been quite nice to me... Today, she was just pissing me off when she decided to threaten me when she realize I was doing mass baking for orders that weren't even in yet.



"If I catch you baking this in bulk before the customer has even decided to order it, I am going to throw it away and let you go out and explain to the customer why they have to wait so long."



.... well the reason is simple, it's because the Chef Trainer wanted me to bake things fresh for the customers, so the dessert that you could have gotten a minute ago has now been fed to the dustbin as she feels that it isn't fresh enough for you, which means you are now forced to either wait another 40 minutes while I complete all the other existing orders before coming back to yours, or you can just cancel the order.



It's just a freaking pancake, not a bloody souffle, no one is going to care whether it just came out of the oven a minute ago or 20 minutes ago and no one is going to be able to tell the difference at all.... unless they spend their whole life eating freshly baked pancakes.... all they will know is that it's crispy (or hard since it's not "fresh out of the oven")  on the outside and soft on the inside




What I was originally doing was making more orders than required, and usually when the orders, along with the excess, are in the process of baking, more will start coming in, which means when the pancakes are done baking, I will have enough to either fulfill all the orders that came in within that 20 minutes baking time, or be short of one or two, in some cases have maybe have like 1 extra... the most I had was 2 extra but they were served within 10 minutes because that was how much order I was getting.



What my Chef Trainer wanted me to do was bake as the orders come in, so let's say I were to bake one order and if another one comes in, I will make another one separately.... which to the customers might sound "really freshly baked" but in reality it's just horrible time management BECAUSE THERE'S ONLY ME IN THE FREAKING PASTRY KITCHEN! I did tackle the orders per her standards the day before and the waiters were literally getting scolded by the customers for having to wait so long for the free desserts. It's ridiculous because the restaurant was giving them a discount for their bill for having to wait so long for their free dessert.




She is the Chef Trainer so I have to listen to her... but the day they start giving out free chocolate souffle is the day I'm going to quit because that's when I know the management has really become deluded about the fact that they are actually low on Pastry Cook(s).

Another rant...

First it was my Pastry Kitchen Assistant who was pissing me off, once that was over and done with, with her quitting her job, it was my boss who kept barking at me to be faster, like his saliva was some kind of speed potion, which didn't work because it made me even more flustered , followed by my chef trainer and her anal standards... in a non-sexual way because I really can't be fuck about her sex life.... right now it's the hot kitchen cook who's ruining my work experience.




The problem I have with the hot kitchen cook is that I can't tell if he's joking or if he's being serious. One minute he will be joking with me telling me I have burnt something and asking me why while smiling, and the next he will be genuinely pissed off at me because I did not clean up my work space... and 5 minutes later he will become all friendly again.  Or he might mask his annoyance in a joking manner.


Example....

The alarm for the oven goes off and I was zoning out... but then suddenly I hear someone go...


"Act blur live longer right.... ACT BLUR LIVE LONGER! EH, ACT BLUR LIVE LONGER RIGHT!"


Turned out his baked rice was done and since I was nearby and did not respond to the ringing alarm, he decided to crescendo what he was saying so the entire kitchen could hear... and this was also during lunch time so there was a crowd of people out front as well. We are working in an open concept kitchen.... open concept sounds good for a house kitchen, a restaurant kitchen... not so much. When I have nothing to do and am just standing around,  the customers are going to see me just standing around which is why after that....



"Eh you got nothing to do right, help the hot kitchen cut onions."

......the sous chef decided to ask me to help the hot kitchen cook cut onions for the day and initially he was very friendly and telling me to be careful not to cut my thumbs, it's so fucking weird because he can be angry at you one minute and then be totally fine the next, so he leaves me to cut the onions while he went to the back of the restaurant to do some stuff.



When it was time to knock off from work, the sous chef decided to tell me to go back home and just leave the onions on the table for the next person to cut... and as I was about to leave, the hot kitchen cook enters the kitchen so I decided to just ask him if I should leave the onions here as instructed by the sous chef just to double confirm...


"So what do I do with this? Should I just leave it here?"


"Keep the onions, you put here for who? You do things can don't do halfway..."  and he was really pissed off..


"So where do I keep the chopped onions?"... it was my first time in the hot kitchen and I did not know how everything worked.



"Put in the fridge lah! Cover the bag and put it in the fridge"... and he sounded really annoyed when he told me that, like it was something I was suppose to know and I just wasted his precious time by asking such a stupid question.



Me asking him where to put the chopped onions is like a non-gamer asking a gamer which came first, the XBOX or the Dreamcast. They are genuinely clueless!... Don't get pissed off because I am asking you something that might potentially make your job harder in the not too distant future if I hadn't.




I am not actually pissed off at him for his attitude because I feel guilty that he has to cover my pastry kitchen when I am not around... which is a lot, but I am definitely glad that after this month, I won't be working in the same kitchen as him anymore.  Time to quit this restaurant and start looking for a job in an actual pastry shop.


The manager did beg for me to stay for a while longer, which is a completely different tune from when I first started.  The first few weeks I was there, all I heard from my chef trainer was them firing workers who couldn't commit, and now they are begging for people to stay because they are severely low on manpower. I said I would but would probably have to take that back soon since my working life there hasn't really gotten any better ever since my first weekend shift. Would really love to NOT have to go back there to work, but I will probably go back there as a customer one day.




First official job I had I left in less than 3 weeks, second one I am gonna leave in 2 months time, hopefully the third time's the charm.