6/4/08

Utterly Ridiculous

I try not to complain about my job, because overall, it's really not that bad. But last night can only be summed up by the title of this post. In all honesty. And I must share the story of the horrors of my night.

Today, my store was inspected by a woman named Judy, who apparently is like the health inspector. And so, for the last week and a half, my manager matt has been cracking the whip on everyone to get the place clean. Now, everyone has a different definition of clean. Mine is "no dirt." His is, "be able to perform surgery on any horizontal surface--and some vertical ones." This, as you can probably guess, is very difficult for a restaurant to aspire to.
And so, yesterday (tuesday, one of the slowest days of the week) there were three closing servers and three closing cooks. Matt only scheduled us this way so that we had plenty of people to clean. He saved all the hard stuff for the night before. Go figure.

Now, the first problem with three closing servers on the second slowest night of the week is that we only make $2.13 an hour. Plus whatever we can make in tips, which, last night, was next to nothing. After taxes, we make 98 cents an hour, by the way. So we were being paid 98 cents an hour to scrub that place from top to bottom. This, we servers thought, was utterly ridiculous. Why not have one person as server, let them take all the tables that come in, and have the other two on as production and handle only the cleaning? But alas, that would make sense. Matt doesn't do that.
Well, the cleaning list was long and so as soon as everyone came in we started picking up jobs. I began my night by scrubbing down the booster seats and high chairs. That took an hour, because hardly any one ever wipes down the boosters or the high chairs when they return them. From there, I spent another hour and a half wiping down all the glass doors and windows. All of them. After that, I scrubbed down the red tile walls (there were only two small ones, this was by far the easiest job all night). I took two tables. Then, I filled a spray bottle with some green stuff, grabbed a rag, and hit the empty side of the dining room.

A brief note about the cleaning solutions at Pizza Hut: there are four colors. Pink, yellow, green, and blue. They're all different, though I'm not really sure which is which. I believe the pink is a de-greaser, the green might be a stain remover, and the blue would appear to be a Windex-like chemical. Yellow is just a basic disinfectant we use when wiping down the tables.

Well. I took my rag and my bottle and got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed the floor. The floor of the dining room is carpeted except for under the tables. This means that there is metal track all around the dining room that accumulates a disgusting amount of grossness daily. I scrubbed that metal until you could see yourself in it. Also, the white tile under the tables is white again rather than that greasy sort of yellowy-brown.
When that was done, I went back up front to help Alyssa H. clean the threshold over the front counter. As I did that, she began to mop the ceiling. And I mean she was mopping it. I found the squeegee mop, she filled a bucket with chemicals, and got to work. Who would have guessed that our ceiling was white? It was like magic.
Alyssa M. had taken it upon herself to begin cleaning the booths, the brave girl. The booths at pizza hut have removeable seats. You can pull the part you sit on out and up, and it comes off revealing a hollow space underneath. These hollow spaces were disgustingly dirty in 8/10 cases. Under one of the benches, we found a birthday registration card from 1995. Under another, someone had gutted a blunt and left a large pile of tobacco leaves. Under a third, one of the big booths, I found pizza pans. Large pans. About a dozen of them, dirty, just sitting there under the booth. Apparently some cooks had gotten lazy and decided that they didn't want to wash them.
We swept all of them out (Alyssa H. ran home for a vacuum because Pizza Hut's doesn't work and our manager isn't going to buy a new one for years because he's cheap and lazy) and that was when the really hard work began. While Alyssa H. swept out the booths on A-side, Alyssa M. and I began to reassemble the booths on F-side. We began this task at about 10:00. Lots of cursing, bench-kicking, and angry yelling ensued.
It took an hour and a half between the three of us to put about 20 booths back together. This was because the benches have little wooden pieces that are supposed to keep them in place. Well. They also prevented them from going back into place. After fourty-five minutes of wrestling with them, we discovered that removing one of the wooden slats made the benches all fit.
I searched the tool box in the office for approximately thirty seconds, and returned to the dining room triumphantly holding a hammer. We knocked those suckers off and finished the booths and it felt good. From there, the Alyssas vacuumed the diningroom and finished up out there while I put away all the clean dishes (a regular night's closing chore for servers) and folded the silverware. I clocked out at 11:45.

Pizza Hut closes at 10 on weeknights.

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