Today was a pretty long day. The girl that was supposed to cook with me got sick and called me yesterday afternoon so I ended up having to use probably the weakest cook in my entire district as my backup cook today. I couldn’t leave my two managers that worked with a weak staff so I left the good cooks at their stores. Not to say I wasn’t sorely tempted to call one of them and make them send me someone but that just wouldn’t be right. Heck if I were them I would have just told me to fuck off anyway.
He didn’t do as bad as I thought he was going to but I also ended up running most of the grill and did most of the cleanup as well, so by the time I had been there eight hours and the next shift started I was able to BEGIN my paperwork and pulling food and operating supplies to get through the next day or so.
I don’t know what the hell has been going around but this stuff needs to stop. The local middle school had 200+ students out one day this past week. About halfway through last week the attendance office at the girl’s school called me. Most of the time when your kid is out they are pressing you to get the kids back in and not miss any school but all the woman would say to me is to make sure NOT to bring them back until they were over it.
I’ve now had about 40% of my staff get sick with either the flu or a stomach virus at one point or another over the last two weeks. The big problem is that when you are most contagious you most likely don’t know you are sick. Too fucking late then. Not only that but most of these folks make between minimum wage to a couple bucks over, at least the cooks do. If they are any good the waitresses make $12-15 an hour. What that means for most of them is that if they miss a day they miss a bill or the kids don’t get snack or they have no gas for the car. Therefore most of them come to work, sick or not and it’s our responsibility to catch it and send them home, particularly since the health code changes last December.
Speaking of the health code, back last fall my company was all about "NOBODY works sick, including managers". What a crock of fucking shit. Being out of work is frowned upon and if you are sick you are expected to handle taking care of business from bed (which is as it should be) and you HAVE to make up the loss in productive hours that week. So if I were to be out sick tomorrow I would be expected to work my day off on Monday or work a double on my first day back. Spend the day in bed worn out and you expect to go back and try to take it easy. Not in my fucking world.
The main reason I mention that is that I’ve had the damned sniffles all day, a runny nose, and the shits. I’ll tell you one thing, I had damn well better be over this shit before next weekend! I don’t particularly want to spend the weekend in the Caribbean fucking blowing my nose and generally acting like a dumbass.
