The setup for a game or event is pretty simple. You first have to get there two to three hours ahead of time with your group to prepare the stand; this consists of wiping down the counters, carrying out all your food items from storage, counting everything from how many bags of M&Ms to how many unfilled boxes of popcorn—usually around two hundred sixty—you have, filling popcorn boxes, putting hot dogs and bratwursts on the grill, and setting up display racks. Once that process is complete, you delegate jobs. Most groups will have runners and people running drawers; those running drawers take orders and deal with money, while runners get food items for the customer. After the game is over, you clean up and count remaining items. If you have a correct or close count, it will take you about an hour. If not, you could spend about three hours recounting every small or large cup left over. This means the same fifteen or so people are spending up to thirteen hours in a little booth working, having to smell food all day, and only getting two food breaks themselves.

Customers seem to believe that those working are brain dead, control an item’s price, and should have their order ready in a minute. I excel in doing addition in my head and can remember prices, so I run a drawer at most of these events. Unfortunately, I have had to walk through my addition process with customers who refuse to believe me. I also get a lot of heat about the prices of items. What people fail to get is that I am not the head of the catering department for the university and that I did not decide that your Snickers candy bar would cost two dollars. Finally, customers seem to think that I am being lazy when the runner gets the unpackaged foodstuff in their order. This is a health and safety regulation; if I were to get your order, I would have to put on new gloves to get your unpackaged food and then throw away the gloves once I was taking your money. With a runner, we can avoid this waste and reduce time. Also, there are displays, with about one hundred dollars worth of merchandise on each of them, sitting on the counter that I need to watch. If I left them alone, someone could steal something off of them and mess up our final count at the end of the night.

At this rate, I will become a socially awkward, disgruntled individual in no time. I have already ruled out retail occupations for future careers. It is sad to think that because of these experiences, I might not try something that might be my dream job.

Some may say the customer is always right, but I don’t believe the business employees should be interrogated for every order they take. So watch out, because even though I wouldn’t, someone might just spit in your drink next time you rudely order something.

I realise that this is a somewhat cynical piece of writing if looked at in such a way… so do note that it is not to be taken totally seriously (unlike every single other article I have ever published)

You’ve got to think outside the box.

Firstly, I’m not in a box… I don’t think I ever have been. Secondly, do employers really want their teams to think controversially and undertake new, innovative and untested approaches to their jobs at all times? I don’t think so; it would be pure chaos if they did! “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it!”

Why would I need to “think outside the box” to calculate a percentage? Or am I just being narrow minded?

There’s no “I” in team.

No there isn’t, but there is no room for a “team” around a single desk to perform some mundane task that one person could finish in five minutes. Naturally, every member must contribute, add their penny’s worth; slow things down. Teams are great for some things, but at other times the individual should be left alone to do the job. But this gem of wisdom seems not to be included in the latest edition of “Management 101”.

Work hard, play hard.

I have cunningly conditioned my mind to not hear this sentence, but to instead hear “work the bare minimum so that you can earn enough money to enjoy the non-working hours of your life”. This conditioning is no small feat, but the irritation I feel when I notice that they assume I fully accept their “live to work” corporate attitude… well, better to just hear something different!

You can achieve anything with the right attitude.

No you cannot. You can never achieve the impossible, that’s why it’s called the impossible. I am not a pessimist, nor do I give up on a task easily; so when I say “it can’t be done” then I actually mean exactly that. It is not a question of attitude. A positive attitude, for example, won’t do much to fix a smashed computer screen or a broken printer! There is a fine distinction between pessimist and realist; I consider myself to belong in the latter category.

Can I borrow your stapler?

Why? Don’t you have your own? Every time I lend you my stapler I lose it and have to go all the way to the basement to get another from the stockroom. Not this time… No you can’t, so go and get your own!

You get out what you put in…

So there is absolutely no net gain for me then, is there. Why would I bother then? If I get out exactly what I put in would I not have been better served saving my time? Putting in nothing to get nothing is the same thing as putting in a pound to get a pound. What a peculiar thing to say to a bored worker!

It was lucky you knew how to do all that…

No, that wasn’t luck; that was the result of hours and hours of patient unravelling of the mess I inherited from some other department. The complicated mathematical treatment comes from years of training and the quality of the writing and clarity of the explanation comes from a great love of reading and a thousand essays worth of practice (over the years).

It was not luck. To highlight: “People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have” (Anne Tyler).

I finish with one of my favourite quotes:  “Where facts are few, experts are many!” (Donald R Gannon)