Step into my office
I’ve been a kitchenhand for a long time, at this moment I probably have a good ten years’ experience under my belt. Working between fulltime and parttime throughout. I have been exploited, abused, gaslit, overworked and underpaid in my time as a dishy. Yet I haven’t felt the need to dip my toes into in any other industry to see if the grass is in fact greener on the other side. Why do I stay? It’s become a rather large question in my life recently, that myself, my family and my friends have all asked me. My answer at this point is; because I am such a skilled kitchenhand, I would be depriving the wellington hospitality scene of a damn good dishy. If you’ve ever worked in a restaurant, you know how important the kitchenhand is to workflow. The problem I’ve found with being good at your job is that people depend on you. I’ve realized lately that my relationship with work is unhealthy. I use it to avoid problems and people in my life. I even dropped one of the papers I was supposed to be doing because I was finding it too stressful to balance work and uni. I even chose work over uni. I delayed getting my degree. I hate my job. But it pays the bills. I think part of me has romanticised this idea of suffering before I get my real job. I also know it helps me understand and feel closer to my late father. He was a chef. I get my work ethic from him. But I think I also inherited his relationship with work. Over summer I worked a lot to try and save some money but ended up still having two jobs by the time uni came back around. I can’t figure out if I like being depended on or not. I’m trying to create more distance between my self and my job, but hospo is so inconsistent. You can’t really count on only working the shifts you signed up for. Anyways let me tell you about how weird my work life has been over the last couple of months.
I am currently in a transitional period, jobwise. It’s complicated. So last year my old job at Beach Babylon was becoming too stressful, between asshole chefs and inexperienced peers, it was just too much to handle on top of starting a new degree, which I was very anxious about. On top of everything, I realized that nothing was going to change about that job. I had been there for two and half years and it was the exact same as it was back then. So, in July 2021, I resigned and went to work at Havana Bar. Working there was so easy. I had a lighter workload with less hours and just less dishes in general. It was a breath of fresh air. I even enjoyed the company of the chefs and became good friends with them. This was huge for me, because I thought I would never enjoy chefs as people, only seeing the monsters they became at work (my father included). But these people were different, they worked hard so everyone experienced as little stress as possible. However, everything wasn’t perfect at Havana. I had taken a pay cut moving from Beach Babylon (down to minimum), I dismissed my worries about this because I was promised a pay rise 3 to 6 months after starting. Unfortunately, a month after I had started, the August lockdown of 2021 began. This hit Havana hard, with business slowing down with every covid scare that happened afterwards, my shifts got cut shorter and shorter. I didn’t want to go through the trouble of finding new a job, but I needed to make more money in order to stay afloat. One day I got a text from my old boss, asking if I wanted to pick up some shift at Babylon, so I agreed. Intending to only go back for the summer and resign once I could be back on the student loan.
But why did I go back to Babylon? I hated that place. Well, I had heard that most of the people I had issues working with back then had since resigned or stepped back in a way. Also, the kitchenhand’s duties in the kitchen had been lessened, sharing more work with the chefs and the pay rate was now significantly higher than minimum wage. The changes I had thought were impossible had been made reality. Working at babs finally felt fair, and like the owners were aware of how just how much their dishies did for them. Just the fact that any change had happened there was huge. It also felt good just to be back, it seemed like people missed me, not only as a colleague but a friend. I balanced working both jobs for a while, like I said I only planned on being at Beach Babylon over summer. Since I was back at babs, I was making a decent amount of money. An amount of money that brought a deal of security I had not had since starting university. So I had a decision to make, do I stay at Beach Babylon or Havana? By the time uni was back I wouldn’t be able to balance both jobs anymore. Or so I thought. My indecisiveness got the best of me, and I had not resigned from either babs or Havana. The problem I had encountered was that I wanted to work at Havana because it was easier, less stressful and I had a few genuine friends there, but I simply made more money working at babs. I was working four shifts a week when uni started back up, 3 at Havana and one at babs. A huge workload on top of university stuff. I ended up dropping a paper after a super stressful week covering for people who were out due to covid. I think that’s when I began to resent Havana. I started having the same thoughts that I had about babs when I quit there “it’s never going to change”. Eventually I started talking about picking up more shifts at babs. When they were offered to me, my response was “I’ll resign from Havana ASAP”.
So that’s how I went back to a job that I hated because the grass is not greener on the other side.
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