When calling off a shift......

There is a vast difference between calling off a shift at a privately owned restaurant, and calling off a shift at a corporate restaurant. Take yesterday as an example…..


Normally there are two servers on at lunch, there are very few lunch shifts where we are really busy. (We’re in Michigan, and the economy still sucks.) So if one person calls off, for whatever reason, and you do the math, there goes 50 % of the wait staff. The owner tried calling someone in, but it was to no avail.

When I got to work yesterday morning, the owner had already started to do the morning set up work, he had the ice bins filled, the coffee was on, and the small banquet room that was going to be used was mostly set up. No need to panic, we’ll just power through it, if we have to.

When the food was ready for the group upstairs, (there were 11) obviously you need more than one tray to carry all this food, so the chef helped out and carried up a tray, saving me a trip. See, teamwork, you just get the job done.

Meanwhile…..the owner was helping with the customers that came in for the regular dining room…he was pouring water, getting bread, clearing plates, resetting tables…again, it’s the teamwork thing……

Now, at a corporate restaurant we get an entirely different scenario….if there are ten servers on and one calls off, you only lose 10% of your staff. The other 90% can easily pick up the slack. But, the manager, will run around like Chicken Little crying “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” Heaven forbid they should have to pick up a dirty plate or carry a tray! (This only happens under the most extreme of circumstances, and you can be sure the entire staff will hear about it. How dare they have to suffer the indignity of doing something so beneath them as to carry a tray!) So rather than just knuckle under and help out, they will spend a quarter of their time desperately trying to bully someone into coming in, and the other 75% percent of their time bitching about it.