Family Perks and Quirks
I was excited when I got a waitress job in the restaurant of this small family-run inn. During the interview, the owner waxed poetic about being able to go swimming and kayaking on my breaks. It was soon clear there would be no swimming or kayaking—busy days meant no breaks at all. I was thrown in with no training, and overworked to the point where I once cried because my feet hurt so much.
My day started with clearing the thick layers of bugs off the patio tables. As family, the other waitresses showed up when they felt like it. As an outsider, I would have to pull double shifts with no notice, while being sniped at for not working fast or hard enough. The customers weren’t great either. One night I had to take back a ‘gimlet’ because (again, no training) I had put in cocktail pickles instead of cocktail onions. The place had its quirks. I was once reprimanded for vacuuming while the air conditioning was on, which blew all the fuses in the whole place. The owner kept her stinking, disgusting, dying dog in the restaurant, whose barf was my problem, apparently.
I’ll never work for a family business again.
That sounds rough, but you should have to take a gimlet back if you put cocktail pickles in it. That’s not what the customer ordered.
i think the point was that mixing cocktails wasn’t part of the job description
No training and being made to make cocktails is embarrassing. (A Gimlet should only have a slice of lime in it, no olives or onions).
Ouch, typical family owned business. I don’t think the OP was complaining about doing the jobs, rather she probably experienced a lot of favoritism issues while having to a lot of things that she wasn’t trained for. Those little bumps in a job that we normally go “hey, it’s a part of the experience of working this type of job” quickly turn into horrible aspects of the job as social issues climb (I can only imagine how frustrated and lost I would feel when the two niece waitresses show up 2 hours after me to immediately go for a smoke break with their owner-aunt…. just an example, but I can see how little issues aggrandize with favoritism).
Like Rod said above, a Gimlet doesn’t have pickled anything in it, but is Gin (or Vodka) and lime juice. A Gibson is a martini with pickled onions in it – classic example of an a-hole customer who orders one thing and expects another. Classic example of the a-hole boss to not have a bartender to help you out, too.