humbled

Happy New Year friends!  I wish each and every one of you a fabulous and wonderful 2012, filled with happiness and adventures!  While I know that I should not focus on the negative, I have a bit of unloading today, but I promise I will end on a positive note.

I had a bad day at work today.  That is rare for me, but sometimes it happens.  I should explain that my vocation of the moment is hostess and bar tender at a family restaurant at a ski resort.  Today I was hosting and it went badly, not because we were overly busy or overly slow, not because of anyone in particular or any one thing; today was bad because a lot of factors were working against me.  I am over tired from working noon to 1am yesterday, and to make matters worse I spent my morning on a (much needed and well enjoyed) 2 hour hike straight up a mountain.  At work everyone was tired from the crazy holiday week we just worked and everything was that much more difficult because we were all feeling a little burnt out.  So there we all were putting on happy faces and greeting hungry customers while in our hearts we all just want to be in our beds having a quiet and relaxing Sunday night.

All of this, added to the fact that things were not as busy as they have been in the recent past, created a bit of negative energy in the dining room.  You see the hostess (myself on this lovely evening) is the one who determines who sits where, and ultimately which servers get tables and when.   Now if I make a mistake in my rotation, or if a group requests a different table than the one I have in mind, or if there are a lot of large parties that can't fit just anywhere, or if families don't want to sit in the pub, or if everyone wants to sit in the pub; all of that effects the flow of restaurant traffic.  And tonight that happened, I sat someone out of turn on accident, and then when I tried to seat the next server no one wanted to sit in the pub, people moved tables, we had several huge walk-in parties, and in the end the numbers were wildly uneven and several servers were very grumpy.

Grumpy servers have only one person to blame, because they can't blame the guests for wanting to sit elsewhere, and they can't blame their manager for putting them in one section or another, so they blame the host.  I remind myself frequently that it is not a personal attack, it is just a venting of frustration; but still at the end of the day, it hurts when it feels like someone is attacking your ability to perform your job.  When I left tonight I spent my 25 minute drive home reflecting on how the night went and I realized that being a host is a more difficult job than I had thought.  It seems so simple and straight forward but the happiness of not only the customers, but also the servers and even, at times, the kitchen, depends on how you do your job.  This realization was very humbling for me.  Hosting was supposed to be a cake walk for me.  It was supposed to be my easy job to fluff up my paychecks in between bartending shifts.  It has instead become the stressful half, and worse, I can justify that stress.

I'll just come right out and say it, tonight some servers made me feel like I am bad at my job - which hurts because I try so hard to be good and proper about how I distribute the tables.  I thought about it and decided that the servers just might not know how hard it is to tell people where to sit and expect them to stay put, and that in turn made me feel as though I could have at some point made someone else feel as though they were bad at their job because I had written their job off as easy when I didn't really know.  So here I am, humbled by the fact that I might not be the greatest at hosting but also learning that not all simple jobs are as simple as they seem.

It's a new year and I'm not going to make a resolution I can't keep like finishing my one photo peer day project or losing 10 pounds, but I do resolve this: I will do my best in 2012 (and beyond) to never criticize the performance of a person whose job might include complexities that I don't completely understand.  Everyone has their own hurtles and making someone feel small or inadequate is not going to help them perform better at work.  Kindness and understanding are infinite resources with much more power than many people have ever realized and I promise to be generous with both.

Happy 2012 everyone!