When the Sun Shines...

[MillieKittan]

Alrighty. First off, I'm just going to mention the 'cant click reply or anything' thing again, because it''s still there and it's still bugging the hell out of me. I can't even reply to my blog posts, which is annoying, can't PM anyone, cant reply, cant edit my posts and cant log out.

My brain seems to think spamming the button with clicks will help. It's fun, but no.

*~*~*~*

That's that rant over, now onto another one: Work.

I work at a Subway which, as far as jobs go, is pretty epic. I'm not paid awesomely, and I dont have any major benefits (other than a free sammach for working and a discount, whoop whoop) and I only get 5 weeks holiday a year. But the poeple there are indescribable. They're so happy and bubbily, even in the worst of times, and they make you want to smile and laugh along with them.

I love the people I work with.

It would seriously be the best job in the world if we didn't have to serve people. We could just go in, make our sandwiches and eat them, prepare and package all the salads and meats and stuff we wouldn't use and then stand there and be paid to laugh and spray each other with water and raid the cookie cabinet (shhhhh~) until it was time to go home, then we could wash the small amount of stuff we used and get the heck-on out of there.

Life isn't that simple though. For some reason people seem to think we're there to provide a service, and make them sandwiches. For their credit, they're absolutely right, but still, they annoy the heck out of me sometimes. The sun has been shining on our little corner of England for over a week now, with no rain intervals (is that a sign of the apocolypse?) and for some reason it pulls out all the nasty a-holes and crap and dumps them in our shop.

Customers I Hate
People that use thier phone when you're trying to serve them annoy me the most. They often walk up to the counter with it held to their ear, hold up the queue for a couple of minutes (which would be out the door in a lunch rush) to continue their conversation, then pause and decide what they want, tell you it without saying hello, and then go back to talking again.

It's part of my job to ask them if they want cheese, and if they want it toasted. Considering they're not paying attention and on their phones you often have to ask them this three or four times before they finally take the phone from their ear and ask you to repeat it.

Someone hold me back.

People who keep their headphones in while ordering or later when we're trying to do their salad. Again we have to ask them questions or something and they cant hear us, so unless they're looking right at you they have no idea you're tyring to talk to them and wander away before you can ask them anything.

You can guarentee they'll be the first to complain if something is wrong, though.

People who look down on you because you are behind the counter. For some reason, a lot of people (who work in shops in the same shopping centre, for God's sake) seem to think that because you're behind that counter with the transparent gloves on, you're an idiot. If you ask them to repeat something because it's hard to hear (there's a good few feet between you and the customer, and there's musical background, not to mention people talking, just geenral noise) they seem to feel the need to repeat their whole order, regardless of what you asked them to repeat, in a slower, more flat voice.

I'm not a moron, I just didnt hear you the first time. I bet you wouldn't have either.

Those who are rude to you, because they think they can be really annoy me. We get sarcastic and stupid people at work that seem to take it upon themselves to make a joke out of everything you do. One guy asked me how long they had to train me to separate the cheese once, because I obviously couldn't do it well. I joked back, but I was still kind of offended, considering he just insinuated I was an idiot who had to be taught how to separate cheese.

That stuff is evil. It's like the ham. It sticks together and then refuses to come apart, and when it does you can guarentee it will take a portion of the slice below it for good measure, Again, I'm not an idiot, I'm just doing my job, and that happens to include separating glued up cheese.

Businessmen/women. Has anyone else noticed that people with big bags or briefcases who are too old to be going to school are always in a rush? Have you noticed it makes them incredibly rude? They appear in the doorway in a hurry and are constantly complaining about the lunch queue while you serve them, which we cant help because we're not just letting it sit there for the fun of it, we're trying to get rid of it too. They order their lunch without saying hello or anything first, and they dont even bother to smile.

The best part is when they get to the till. Most of them choose to pay by card, which is contradictory to anything useful considering the card machine is slower than paying by cash. On top of that, it is often out of order, because our till and our network are both crap. So the irate customer has to take their bank card, walk the whole 30 seconds roudn the corner to a cash machine and get money out, and then come back again.

Wish someone would pay me as much as they earn to deal with them,

Old people. I dont have anything against old people, in general. I like them, even the crazy ones that keep forgetting your name and talking to you about something random while you waitfor the bus. There's a nice scottish woman near me that always talks to me while I wait for the bus. I cant understand a word she's saying, but it's nice she takes the energy to talk to me.

Most of the old people we get in at work, though, are grumpy and cynical. They wont take any sandwich advice you give them, and dont seem to understand that though they have no need to rush about their choices, we do have a queue of thirty odd people to serve behind them, and we'd like to get rid of them so we can start cleaning up for the evening. I love them, but sometimes they're not very helpful.

People who get arsey with you because you dont have the time to stop and talk. Some of our customers, quite rightly, want to have a conversation with the person making their sandwich. This is all well and dandy when there's just three people who need serving and there's three of us on the sandwish line, but when there's a queue we dont have time to stop and chat.

There are a few customers that seem to think this is us being unfriendly and mugging them off, but we arent, I assure you. We just need to work the queue down, which has probably been getting no smaller for the last hour and a half, so most of us are really too worn out and waiting for our break to even think about anything other than sandwiches.

We'd love a conversation, but come back when it's quiet, ok?

Foreigners. They're good for the country, as they bring money in and tourism and stuff, but man do I hate serving them. Most of them dont know any english, or the basics, so they dont seem to know how to ask for anything. They do alot of pointing, and nodding, and frowning.

Honestly, pointing at a board with six or seven sandwiches on it tells me nothing.

They hold up the queues and they make our jobs more difficult, but to be fair most of them do try to promounce words, and one was slowly learning what all the salad was as I pointed at it and said the word, she repeated it. Then there are the cocky ones that think they know the language, and they usually are better than the others, but the form they learn is very rude. It includes no please, no thank you. Just the word yes.

They're always in a rush to leave to, and there's no politeness.


The Wednesday Fiasco
I was timetabled to be in work yesterday from 3 to a close, which is usually about 9.30 or 10, depending on the amount of stuff there is to clean up. I got a lift from my grandad, as he was dropping something else off at my house a few hours before, and wandered around the shopping centre a bit.

Once I got bored, I pottered over to work.

My boss got me to start half an hour early, which I have no complaints about since I get paid for it, and left at 3 himself. That left just me, Holly and a boy called Kenny (I call him Kevin, he still hasnt noticed) on the line. We thought that Kevin would be staying a little longer, but turns out he was already overshooting his 2pm leaving time, and would be leaving at 4.

Before he left the place was packed with people, and by the time it came for him to leave the queue had only just been annihalated. That meant that now he was gone Holly and I had to juggle preparing food, cleaning and customer service all on our own.

Task and a half, I can tell you.

Everything in that place has to be cleaned every evening, may it be with spray and a cloth or actually put through the three-stage washing up process out back. With absolutely nothing clean, the oven still too hot to do anything with because it had only just been turned off, breads still in their cooking forms on trays and a mountain of washing up to do, I promptly predicted we'd be there til midnight.

And so it began. Every time we went to do some kind of cleaning task, a customer or five would walk in and keep both of us from doing anything constructive. Whereas it should have taken me ten minutes at the most to clean and re-paper the cookie cabinet, it took me an hour, because I kept getting stopped by customers.

Damn customers.

We had one last customer before we closed and, of course, Murphey's law dictates that he had to be a pain in the arse. He was easily in his twneties or thirties, and he came in with a woman who I assume was his Mum. She ordered two hot chocolates, and I set about making them after taking their money.

Our coffee machine doesnt do hot chocolate, we buy in sachets and just use the hot milk function. You also have to make sure you click 'large' once, and then add a regular filling to it to get it to the top of the cup. So there I was stirring hot chocolate and thinking about how behind we were, and I must have pressed two smalls in one of the cups by mistake, though I didnt notice at the time, put the lids on and handed them back to the lady.

I went back to the cleaning task I was doing at the time, and a few seconds later there was an 'excuse me' from behind me, so I turned around. The man was there, and explained that his cup wasn't full properly and wanted it fuller. I appolgised, because it was only half full and went back and refilled it, giving him a cookie as an aoplogy and a good will gesture. He got hismum to check her drink, which was fine, just as I handed it and the cookie back to him.

He took it without a thank you, and added "Check it next time, idiot." before walking out of the store.

If I hadnt had already given it back to him, I would have poured it down the sink and given him his money back out of the till, and told him where to go. Typically he was wearing the badge of one of the shops in the shopping centre, and expensive one, so maybe he thought he was better than me or something.

I'm just glad I forgot to give him his 10% discount for working in the shopping centre. Prick doesnt deserve it.

Closing time came, and the only cleaning that had been down was the oven, proofer and the microwaves. I'd started cleaning out the chillers we keep the food in out front, but again, I'd been stopped by the appearance of customers, and my once clean chiller was covered in lettuce and olives again.

We promptly turned the music up and went outside so Holluy could have a cigarette and I could just sit down in the cool air. It was 8.30pm and still bright as a button outside, minus the lack of lights and people around the shopping centre, as the place was closing up for the night.

I swear people must come to the shopping centre at that time of night just for Subway. We're the only thing open.

So with a little break and a new action plan, Holly and I ventured back inside and got to work doing...well, everything. Holly took over doing behind the front counter whilst I had front of house to deal with. That meant she was finishing my cleaning tasks round there while I filled up the crisp (chip?) display cabinet and refilling the drinks cabinet. I then cleaned all the tables and the doors for the bins (they're kept in little cupboards, to make them look tidy) and swept through the restaurant before attacking it with a blue scourer, then finally mopped all that up.

By now Holly was onto counting the till, so I set into the piles of washing up we had left. Finally having finished all of that I put all the metal work that needed to be back out front (bowls to catch cuttings and crumbs and rubbish from the cutting boards and numerous random parts of the proofer and cold/ hot wells) and set into the sauce bottles and knives.

Finally, with that all done, I washed the sinks and grabbed the broom again. Time to sweep out back.

That didnt take very long, and nor did mopping it. While I was doing that Holly collected all the bin bags and relined the bins, before dumping them all by the door to be taken round to the trash. When I finished doing that and decapitated the coke machine (pulled the nozzles out and soaked them in hot water) I took all the bins round to the back.

Without further adue we set the burglar alarm and mopped ourselves out of the back, leaving the mop bucket and mop in the doorway into the lobby, and scarpered, depserate to get home. My estimate had been almost correct, as it was 11.45pm before we got out and 12am before I got home.

9 hour day. £45 on my paycheck on Friday. Can't argue with that.