Trouble in Paradise

My last post might have seemed quite exciting but in particular my job at this Chinese restaurant was quite simple. Most nights I would come in and prep for the lunch rush for the following day. This mostly required me cutting chicken. On an average night I could cut about 50 pounds of chicken. Cutting the chicken was just simply slicing it thin, length wise so the cook for the next day could have chicken to cook for the lunch rush and not have to prep some in the morning.

Needless to say one night after two days off I come into work and the general manager comes up to me and says "Cesar I need you to cut 80 pounds of chicken." Thinking to myself I said "Okay". I knew I couldn’t cut that much chicken because the most I had ever cut in one night was 55 pounds.

So later that night the manager returns and asks me how much chicken I've cut and I reply to him "I’ve cut 50 pounds so far." He looks at me and says "I'll be right back." So I continue on working and a couple minutes later he returns with the chef. The manger begins to ask me "Cesar, what have you done all day? I asked you to cut 80 pound of chicken and you only have 50, now we don’t have enough for the lunch rush tomorrow. What have you been doing, playing around all day?" I proceed to reply by saying, "No I haven’t, I obviously was cutting chicken how do you think I cut 50 pounds if I was playing around. Secondly, this chicken is frozen like a block, I have to thaw it out and still it’s taking longer to thaw out than for me to cut it." The manager then replies back to me, "No Cesar you obviously were playing around and that’s why you’re not done. I know you like to take your time and milk the clock but this is unacceptable, now I'm mad." Obviously by now this is an argument, I haven’t raised my voice but I wasn’t going to let the manager walk all over me. So I proceed to say, “First, neither you nor the chef have been back here so how could you know if I was playing around or not. Secondly I haven’t been to work in two days and the first day I come in you ask me to do two nights worth off prep. What has the other cook been doing the last two nights that we don’t have any prep for tonight and for tomorrow morning?"The manager furiously just responds with, " That’s none off your business what he’s been doing, stop making excuses, your just a lazy cook. Get out of my face and onto the line."

So here I am later that night cleaning the kitchen, and then I hear a chuckle, I look up and its street pharmacist and he’s laughing and he has a grin on his face like "ha-ha Cesar got in trouble." What really bothered me wasn’t that he was laughing but that he wasn’t helping me clean. After all I had just been called a lazy cook. So I ignore him and start my cleaning again only to hear another loud laughter but this time it’s my manger and chef. They’re both sitting down and eating while telling jokes and laughing. Right then and there it hit me, I said to myself "Cesar what are you doing here you’re the only one working, everyone else is just slacking off. No one appreciates you here. This place is a dump it’s time for you to quit." It was after this night that I realized that I was so eager to have my first job that all those little things tiny things that bothered me I ignored, whether it was other workers not helping me, or just seeing the chef or the manager always laughing or on their phones doing nothing. All of this finally was shown to me in its full spectrum. I knew I couldn’t leave this place without finding another job first, but luckily for me luck was on my side.