Work Nightmares.

I've always found work dreams fascinating.  They are almost all the same.  Mine usually consist of beeing in the weeds and nothing is in the right place, guests are moving around, there are weights around my ankles etc. 

I spent the summer of 1995 working at a restaurant in Walla Walla Washington at a restaurant called Jacobi's Cafe.  Jacobi's was a pretty big restaurant, it was built in a Train Depot with an actual train car attached to it.  It was a large restaurant, with a pretty complicated system of operations.  It ran on a primitive version of Micros (a retail Point of Sale System), the sections were big, and if you were working in the Train Car, you needed to navigate stairs, and a 40 yard distance from the kitchen at the farthest point. 

Now if you've ever worked in a restaurant before you know that the farther away from the kitchen you are the more "running" you're going to have to do, so your level of organization must be high.  You quickly learn to maintain all your tables at the same time.  The most difficult station at Jacobi's was Red.  (The stations were color coded and right above the service station in the train there were six colored lights.  The chef would turn on the light for the station who's food was ready, and you needed to haul ass to the kitchen to run that food or there was hell to pay.  Also there was very little teamwork in this restaurant so it wasn't unusual for the chef to start flashing the light if our food was dying.) Station Red was in the very back end of the train car, and it had six four tops, and a private dining room that could seat up to 12. 

During that summer, I was trying to make enough money to stay in school, and so I was working alot of doubles, and working up to 11 shifts a week.  It was alot, but I was 20 years old, and all I wanted to do was make some dough, so I was happy to stick with it for the summer, put some money in the bank, and grind it out until school started again. 

I was still new to that type of service.  Jacobi's had a little something for everyone.  They had interactive trivia, yards of beer, a salad case that was outstanding!!!  They had sixteen different types of salads and did a bang up job of executing them.  But one of the perils of it was that people would come in and order a salad dish, and you could have up to four different types of salads, and if you got an entree it automatically came with a salad choice, of which they could split their choice up to four times.  So It wasn't uncommon to get a entree order for a Chicken Parm, with a side salad of spinach, pasta, pea, and house salad with a vinaigrette dressing.  And every order was like this.  I became very efficient at taking people's order my memory, since I was that young, my brain was sharp and would often blow peoples minds by being able to memorize orders like that up to twelve at a time.  There's no way in hell I could do anything like that now, I'm already worried about how absent minded I may be in my later years...I digress.

Needless to say, at the end of this summer, after working my tail off, I was beginning to burn out...and that's when the nightmares started.  I would have dreams that I would walk into work, put my apron on, and the manager would walk up to me and say. "Neil, we opened another section on the other side of town and we quadruple sat you."

In my dream I would walk to the other side of town, and apon arrival everyone was PISSED.  "We've been sitting here for an hour and a half!!"  I would of course appologize and juggle for them, kiss their children, or do whatever I could to make them happy, get everyone's order, and begin the long walk back to the restaurant.  When I arrived back at the restaurant, the manager would walk up to me and say.  "We filled red, can you get on that?"  Enter Red, and repeat. 

This was a reoccurring dream until I quit Jacobi's in the Fall.  I've also had dreams that I was super busy, and my feet were buried in cement cubes. 

What are your nightmares?  Please post your nightmares on the Open Palate Blog instead of the Facebook site.  It's a little more central for everyone.