Work, work.

So I said there would be a second post about work, and this is it. OK, so I'll run you through the daily routine.

• 9:50: Get into work clothes.
• 10:00h fold aprons, food rags, and cleaning rags into bundles with names on for cooks and chefs. Write THE KEY!!!! on Thiago's.
• 10:10 clean the R.A. (wash room, wash pit, Guantanamo bay)
• 10:30 Construct 16 to 36 lobster sandwiches for lunch and the evening rush.
• 11:30 put on rotisserie chickens.
• 11:35 clean R.A, in prep for lunch as it will have been trashed by the cooks.
• 12:00 Work the line. I suddenly become a line chef for an hour, and cook Chili Chicken, Hot wings, Calamari, and Tuna Taco's to order. This is tough, stressful work. But good fun when it all pulls together, and some cracking team work comes into play.
• 1:00 Attempt escape from the line, Cut rotisserie chickens.
• 1:05 Get into the R.A, attempt to blitz dishes.
  
• This is were it all starts to get hazy depending on what day it is.
• 2:00 finish dishes, and start to construct Crispy Mash roles.
• 3:30 finish Crispy Mash. And return to R.A, Wash stuff that has built up from cooks and non lunch rush dishes.
• 4:30 Clean R.A. Again. Get inside machine and give it a good going over.
• 5:00 Home time! :-D

But the thing is, it never really works out like this. There might be more or Chickens, or we run out of Crispy Mash, or I get called back to the line. Its incredibly tough work, I never really have time for a lunch break, and often have to make do with pint of lemonade and a cigarette, but I do get paid for the time. But the thing is, I actually really enjoy it. Eurocopter you spent all of your time in front of a keyboard, and spent most of the afternoon looking at the clock, and wondering when I could go home, even when I first started my days were like that. The office was always around 20C, no taste, no texture. Grey. But here I look at the clock and go "Shit! I've only got 3 hours left, and I've not done the mash yet." In the past working this hard used to annoy me, because it felt like I was the only one working that hard. But here every one works like demons, I've not got it the easiest, but I'm a long way from having it the hardest, the other day one of the cooks nearly removed his finger, and had to have 15 stiches, he was back at work the next day I don't have split shifts, and my food prep is pretty simple, if repetative. At Currys I was always the one who did the most work, at Eurocopter I was the only one in my department who could touch type, so I got all the dull form based work, and had the most to do.
Also there's extremes of temperature, smells, textures, my brain isn't melting in my skull. Plus the people I work with are all around my age, and I have a lot more common with them, we talk about what we've been to see at the cinema, not what they've taken there kids to see.
But by far the best bit is the job isn't black and white. At Eurocopter a piece of paper work was either wrong or correct. It couldn't be lovely, you could never look at a 'EASA Form 1' and go "wow, I really want that" you'd just go "you spelt Installation wrong". But a Chili Chicken can look horrible or delicious. The other day I surved up a monstrous pile of Calamari, and Adam said "Greg, that looks amazing. Nice job." and I realised thats probably the first time some has said that about something I've created in a Long time. Shit, at Eurocopter I would have to get forwarded the "Nice job on a project" e-mails because people would forget to add me into the original e-mail, even though I had planned pretty much on entire project by myself. It just plain sucked.... still its early days, there is still plenty of time for me to go off it. Or maybe I'll learn to make more cool stuff and work the line proper. Who knows?