"Oh, I'm Ross - I'm too Good for the Hut"

Wednesday night was my first shift training at the Pizza Hut/Food Avenue in Target. From those six hours, working Food Ave seemed to revolve around cleaning, shoving personal pan pizzas in the roller oven, and handing out Icee cups to nine year old boys, who like to mix the raspberry, blueberry, and Cherry Coke Icee to make a brown slushie they proclaim "awesome!". Totally doable.

Then came Thursday. The plan was for me to train all morning with Nicole, a team leader, and learn how to open the Food Avenue, watch a bunch of the required videos, and generally ease my way into food handling and pretzel salting. Ha! When I showed up at 7am, Nicole had called in from the emergency room with some sort of neck debacle, so Candace, who was supposed to be working Starbucks, would now be training me... which means there would be two of us to work the Food Ave and Starbucks... one of whom was not certified in Starbucks, and knew little to nothing about Food Ave... so now we have all the components for a day of chaos and half-assing.

The day was ridiculous. Candace taught me how to open Food Ave, while we simultaneously opened Starbucks for the day and dealt with a fruit fly invasion in the pastry case. Normally two separate (trained) people do these jobs. Then it was the two of us manning both areas until 9, when one more employee showed up to help. I stumbled my way through Food Ave most of the morning, learning how to prep sandwiches, salads, and pizzas, helping guests, filling in at Starbucks when I could, and generally trying to run around like a superhuman all the while remaining perfectly calm and in control. Never a hair out of place ;) (No thanks to my super-fly Target baseball hat and apron).

Candace and I actually managed fairly well - both of us were ready to drop by 3:30 when we were done with our shift, but she complimented me on the day and seemed pleased with my progress (gotta love being thrown into the open ocean to learn to swim... or drown really really quickly). Most important lesson of the day... when in doubt, use an oven mitt! I have another closing shift tomorrow night. I can only hope that everyone who's supposed to be there, is there, and of course, that our precious Icee machine keeps spitting out sugary goodness...