Server Initiation: aching feet
Well folks, I am halfway through my training, and…well…it’s been painful. Physically.
The job is awesome: the kitchen is enormous, well organized, and professional, and all of the other Dining Room Servers are really nice. So far, I have shadowed three different servers, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They were all very nice, and understanding towards the end of my 24-hour shift with a 5-hour break when I started fading fast. Yes, that’s right, 24 hours with 5 hours off in between. This is why I am in pain. Standing on my feet, running around on a hard tile floor for that long is unbelievably hard on soft pads. I am currently in bed, icing the poor suckers.
This is how it goes:
Servers have two shifts per day, generally. You can have 2 consecutive (breakfast-lunch, or lunch-dinner), or ideally breakfast-dinner, so you have a break in-between. THEN, there’s what’s called a “turnover,” where they schedule you on dinner one night, then a double the next morning (breakfast-lunch). That’s what I had on my very first shift. How nice of them. Breakfast starts at 6:15, and you MUST shower before each shift (they smell-check you). Breakfast shift goes right into lunch, with a half hour break. Lunch starts at 11:30 and ends at 3:30. Dinner starts at 4:45 and ends at midnight. And for those of you in the restaurant biz, let me tell you, the side work is intense: an hour to an hour and a half per shift. Yikes! This will require getting used to.
So how the hell is this job awesome, you might ask? Well, the up-side to this shabang is that they are conscious to schedule time around your “weekends” really nicely. Each employee gets to pick a weekend (2 consecutive off-days), and you can schedule them with your friends (this does not pertain to me, as I have no friends yet). Your weekends are the same every week, unless you request a change. But say your weekend is Saturday & Sunday, then they schedule you on early on Friday so that you can leave Friday afternoon or evening. Then, after your two days off, your next shift will always be dinner, such that you don’t have to come back until Monday (in this example) at 4. That’s a pretty sweet deal! So those of us who like camping can get a good 3-night trip in.
So besides the hard adjustment to the workload, I am really loving it here. The money is good (apparently, dining room server is the highest-paying position offered by Xanterra), and living in the park is a priceless benefit. The employee dining room food is really good, and it is actually really nice to not have to prepare food for myself all the time. I like my dorm and roommate, Minji, too. She moves out in three weeks, though, and I will have a single all to myself; I won’t lie, I’m excited for that, though I will miss her company. She’s a lovely girl.
Tomorrow, one of the servers who trained me is taking me swimming at a waterfall near the South entrance, which has a hot spring feeding into it. We have the day off until dinner at 4:45, so we can spend the day there relaxing before work. Hopefully the water will make my feet feel better.
Top
Walking to work yesterday, I had my head down and my eyes on the path. I hear a snort, and looked up. A couple of meters in front of me was a Bison, whose name, I have since learned, is Mort. He is the lone Bison that lives outside of the employee residence area. Standing right in the middle of the trail, he looked directly at me, scaring me half to death. I stopped dead in my tracks and backed up slowly like they showed us in the training video. I was terrified.
Last week a man got gored by a Bison at Mammoth (another location in the park). Apparently, he was sitting on a picnic table, and the bison started to approach him. Not really paying much attention to the danger of the situation, the man pulled out his camera to take a picture. The bison charged, head-butted him and threw him 20 feet in the air. He fell to the ground, breaking 4 ribs and his collarbone. Then the Bison pinned him to the ground by stabbing him through the gut. Lesson learned: don’t mess with Bison. 80 percent of wildlife-related injuries are due to Bison. Oh. The man survived. I’ve learned that despite popular belief, grizzlies are not man’s greatest threat here. Only 7 people have died in Yellowstone due to bear attacks, in the past hundred -plus years since the park was established in 1872. BUT, this leads me to my next story:
When Lake village opened this year, and employees began arriving, they found a mama grizzly and her cubs, who had made their home behind the Hotel annex. With the influx of people, the bear family moved away from the buildings, but are still in the area. Well, a couple of weeks ago, one of my coworkers, Mya, was walking back from work when the mama grizzly spotted her and began to charge (Mya didn’t see the bear at first, as the mama was in the woods with her cubs). Luckily, this happened right by the road that we cross to get to our dorms, and a tourist driving an SUV was close enough to realize the danger. He drove the car between her and the bear, and she jumped into the car. What an amazingly close call. No one knows if the bear was going to attack or just bluff, but either way, I think we can all agree that this is too close of a call for comfort.
Discalimer: these stories are told by everyone in different ways…I’ve done my best to recount them with as much accuracy as possible
Last night when I got off work at midnight, the other servers went to the EDR (employee dining room) to snack on cereal. I was exhausted, so I said goodnight, and went out the door. I got about 30 steps in the pitch black night, and remembered where I was. You never know what you might stumble upon in the night here, and it’s not worth finding out in a gory and horrific way. I turned back towards the EDR, and waited for them to walk home with me. They chuckled at my naivety; I’m a rook
