With the end of the semester coming soon, most students would be going back home to a job that they had, maybe for a while or recently been hired at. I was one of those students who knew that I had a job waiting for me at home. That was until recently.
I had just finished my senior year of volleyball and wanted to start working. I looked around my area and began working at a restaurant chain. I’ll give you a little hint as to which restaurant it is. “Red Robin, YUM!”; yep, my first job was at Red Robin. I started at the end of January 2023 as a hostess. I was nervous but ready to start something new. When I first arrived, it was tough to find my footing. I thought that some of my coworkers disliked me or thought that I should not work there. Well, that was me overthinking about it.
One story that I have from when I first started was for the Super Bowl that year. I was scheduled to work the Super Bowl, and I knew that to-go was going to be incredibly busy. It had gotten to the point that the kitchen was backed up with orders. This one man came in asking for his order. I checked where we placed the orders, and it was not there. I checked the iPad and it said that the order was still cooking, so I went back to have an idea of how long I should tell the customer.
When I got back there, I saw food; no countertop at all, just food. I asked the person working to-go and they told me to tell him that the kitchen is backed up and that they are doing their best to get all the orders out. So, I went up and told him. He said okay, and I went back to seating customers. Maybe 10 minutes later, he comes back up. I check again, and I was told to tell him the same thing that I previously told him. Went back up and told him. He sat back down. Not even 10 minutes after that, he asks again. I told him the same thing that I told him for the previous two times. He gets mad and basically tells me that “I did not care about his order” and that I “was a young, dumb-blond who did not know how to do [my] job,” and so much more. The trainee-manager came up and asked what was going on. The man told him, and the manager said, “If she has told you that the kitchen is backed up and that they are working on it, then the kitchen is backed up and they are doing their best to get EVERYONE’S orders out.” And at this point, the entire lobby was filled with people waiting for their to-go orders. The man then acted nice because it came from the manager. After his order came out and after the rush, I was able to watch the last few minutes of the game. The same trainee manager came over to where I was and told me, “Not many people can say that they got paid to watch the Super Bowl.” I will always remember him saying that.
Another story was also from my first summer working there. Two tour buses came into the parking lot; I and the other hostess were very confused. Two people came in saying that they were told that we could accommodate their party and that they communicated with the management about how many people they had in their party. Well, the manager never told us about the party until they were already inside. The party size…50 people…yes, you read that right. A party of 50 people was coming in. We had no idea where to sit them at that moment. When my coworkers found out, they were shocked, and we all agreed that no one was leaving at their proper time and that the kitchen was going to be backed up. We made it work, but I thought that was the most people that we had. I later found out that 50 people was not the largest party we had to seat. The highest number of people in one party that my coworkers had to sit was around 100 people. Yep. I was very happy I was in Florida when that happened last summer.
This summer, I thought I was going back to Red Robin. Until I texted one of my managers about me coming back, and that was when I got hit with the news of a new district policy within the company. Basically, they could not hire or re-hire seasonal workers because it was tough for them to get their hours back and I no longer had a job. Now I had to ask myself “what do I do now? What do I do next?” When I found out, I knew that there was something happening within the company, because during winter break, I did not get many hours at all. Two out of the four times I worked were shifts from other coworkers. The one thing that I am annoyed about is that I was not given a warning or was not told that it was happening. I was never contacted by any of my managers telling me about the new policy until I reached out to one of the managers. So, currently, I do not have a job for the summer yet. I am in the job-hunting process. I applied for the Buffalo Zoo, but I have yet to hear back from them. But, I am still looking.