charlie trotter was a chef, and he started a restaurant in chicago twenty five years ago which got pretty famous. about six years ago, he opened a fine dining take-out and catering store just around the corner. i sent them my resume off a craigslist ad, they had me come in for an interview, then come back for a few hours of on-the-job work - a stint they have a word for which sounds an awful lot like "stoogin'," which is what sticks in my head and makes me giggle. they had me make what amounted to a potato lasagna, and it turned out looking pretty good. good enough for them to hire me.
by midway through day one, it had become apparent to me (if no one else), that they may have made a mistake. perhaps my resume wasn't examined closely enough - maybe they missed that i never went to cooking school, or that the restaurant i work at is on navy pier. by day three, i was in full-on panic mode; little seizing moments of terror in the midst of things that had me thinking run, run... before someone turns a corner and finds you out, realizes you barely have a handle on what's going on around you, discovers you in the middle of cleaning up some coincidental mishap or another and throws you out on the street. having trotter's on the resume could be a huge deal; what if it worked the other way around? what if they called around, told them how much i suck, polaroid of me next to a giant batch of soup, pile of salt sitting on top, salt shaker still held out, extended, open-ended, screw-off top clearly visible just beneath the hill of salt... "DO NOT HIRE" written beneath in sharpie...
i'm getting better, though. serving rich people is easy - for one thing, there's a hell of a lot fewer of them. a busy day there consists of maybe 30, 40 purchases all day. usually it's more like twenty. it's hard to adjust to not making food to order, though; there are a few things i've had to make consistently, but i have a lot of freedom to make what i want. it's almost a crippling amount of freedom, actually; the first time someone looked at me and said, "okay, go back in the cooler, look around, and figure out a cold salad to make," i was a bit intimidated. but i've started nosing out recipes here and there, and i've had a decent set of people around me to help me out in the right directions.
i'm running out of talkin-steam. point being, i'm aware of a rather large vacuum of confidence inside me as i walk in each day, which fades a bit more with each passing hour. if i keep up this act long enough, keep pretending like i know exactly what i'm doing, i might get away with it - wind up with an awesome job, all because i'm awesome.
1 comment:
Man, I definitely understand that feeling of faking your way through a situation that is just a little bit over your head.
I started band in middle school as an eighth grader, while everyone else came in during sixth grade. I then moved on to high school, and signed up for band there.
What I didn't realize that those extra two years of experience really, really help. People could hit notes consistently that I couldn't. The speed at which I had to read music drastically increased. It was sink or swim, and I felt like I was eyeball deep most of the time.
And then there were sessions in class where they'd go through and make people individually play parts, and one particular one stands out to me. There was this rapid succession of notes we had to punch out(I played trumpet, p.s.). They were all fairly high, and the time signature was a bit weird on this piece-- but when it was my turn to play it I fucking nailed it. The teacher goes, "good, but that was too pretty. this part is supposed to be almost percussive if that makes any sense."
Floored. Anyway, keep doing what you're doing until they tell you otherwise. I had a fucking amazing time in band and made really great friends.
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