Oh, the day I had today. Not the worst, but definitely not the best either. And although this is not really an article focused on saying anything in particular, I'd like to talk about the day itself and perhaps there's something to learn from my mistakes.
First and foremost, I work in a kitchen in Germany. I'm saying this so you can get an idea of what type of work I do. Second, in the kitchen, I do multiple things, therefore any mistake that I make at my station has a good chance of affecting another.
The day started off badly because I made a mistake even before the day started - I went to sleep way too late. Specifically, 2 AM. And although I wake up at around 9:30 to go to work, it takes me a while to fall asleep and sleep itself is never guaranteed to be good. There are times when I have to wake up to go to the bathroom, or I wake up because it's way too hot in the room or whatever. Besides all that, working in a kitchen means that I am on my feet all day long, walking all the time, making food, carrying it and other things, and taking care of a lot of other tasks. So, sleep is very important because if I don't get enough of it and if it isn't high quality, my body can't properly recover from all the physical effort.
So, I started the day with little sleep. I came in tired and proceeded to do my tasks. There weren't that many people at midday so there wasn't much to do, but I still had to peel potatoes, chop a bunch of vegetables, prepare fish, clean things around, and put things in their place in the fridges.
After that, the main mistakes began - being so tired and in no mood to do anything, I wasted as much time as possible doing nothing rather than preparing for the second part of work (we work in two parts: from 10 to 2 and from 5 to 9). I sat down, I was on my phone, I was spending time with my girlfriend, and so on. Nothing productive.
Break came, and I spent part of it making a cake with my girlfriend's mother for my birthday, then left work, took a shower, and slept for around 40 minutes. At 5, I went down, and work started.
Right from the beginning, my lack of preparation made things really bad for the night. There were enough potatoes for what had to be done in the beginning but not enough for what was to come when more people would arrive, so I had to go in the back and spend around 10 minutes peeling as many potatoes as I could to get some ready.
During those 10 minutes, more tickets for food came in. I went to the kitchen once I was done and was told I needed to prepare a few portions of fish. I opened my fridge drawer and guess what - I didn't have enough of the fish that I needed. I did what I could with what I had, then another ticket came in for vegetables without peas, which I was responsible for. I made the vegetables as quickly as I could, stressed as I was, then ran to the fridge where the fish was, got what I needed, and came back to the kitchen to prepare the remaining portion.
Once that was done, the vegetables that I prepared were taken out by another colleague who noticed that I put peas in when I shouldn't have. I had to take the portion of vegetables and remove all the peas while everything was really hot, add more carrots, and then give it back to be put in the steamer for the carrots to get hot again.
More fish came in, I panicked, and I continued to run around trying to get every portion done. Then I took the peeler that I used to peel those potatoes that I mentioned before, which I threw on the table when I came into the kitchen, and I began washing it. Once done, I tried to put it in my pocket where I normally have it, but because I was so stressed and focused on 5 things at once, my finger got stuck between the two edges of the peeler, and I cut my finger.
I took the peeler, threw it on the table, noticed that there was blood coming out from where I cut myself, ran to get a glove, then to the bar to get a bandage, fixed the bleeding, put a glove on, and continued to work.
For about 30 more minutes, I continued to make small mistakes and to overlook things that were important because I was still stressed and confused from all the things that happened in the past 20 or so minutes. I continued to go to the fridges to get things that I needed that I didn't prepare, had to go around decorating food and taking it out, helping my colleagues, all while barely keeping my eyes open and having trouble concentrating on anything.
The lesson here? Well, I don't know if there's one for you since you might not be working in a kitchen, but for me, the lesson is simple - prepare, prepare, and prepare again. And when I say that, I mean not only in the kitchen but outside of it too - prepare myself to get enough sleep for the next day, prepare my tools to make sure I have them ready for the next day, then prepare everything at work when I can to make sure I have everything that I need when I need to make food.
