Walk a shift in my shoes bossman
My first job when I was a teen was as a dishwasher in a coffee shop that was just open a month in my seaside town.
The owners had just left other jobs with a bit of cash and set up the place thinking it'd be easy money ticking over in the background of their retirements. Problem of course was they didn't want to work in it, but also didn't want to hire an experienced manager to run it either. As you can assume, problems ensued from the get go.
My MC was late on in the summer. My job was to clear and clean all the tables, wash and dry all the dishes and make sure the floor was spotless. The problem of course was that that takes at least 2 people to do on a calm day, never mind busy weekends in the midst of summer holidays and as the boss didn't work there, he assumed I could do it all by myself. Now I didn't have any frame of reference for how hard a job actually should be so for the entire summer I had been busting my ass doing all this and barely making it work. I had adopted so many shortcuts that the dishwasher never actually got used as the baristas were telling me to hand wash stuff as they needed to serve it. We barely had enough cups to have the place full of coffee guzzlers and have some dirty to wash in the kitchen. So that meant I was in the kitchen most of the time scrubbing, and barely having enough time to run out and lift dirty trays, but I still managed to do both. (Looking back now I actually had to physically run around the cafe at times make it all work, wtf) Of course the boss would walk in randomly in the day and I'd get a telling off for the floor being dirty, or a tray on a table. Didn't matter if the tray had been there 10 seconds, it was my fault.
Now I had dealt with this all so far, sucked it up and just pushed on thinking I must have just been slow.
That was until the busiest day of the year, when we have a show in town. The place was full and with town so busy, people didn't even mind standing with no seats to have a drink. The boss gets called in as we are swamped and not coping (no cups, long queue of angry customers, people sitting at dirty tables). When he walks in he immediately points at every table with an empty cup on it and then says there is no cutlery, only to further add that the floor is a disgrace. I brick it and run out to the floor to clean and ask him to cover the dish washing for a minute (I had been stuck hand washing dishes just so that baristas had something to put coffee in). He's appalled, but complies. It's only when I get back I see he's obviously never worked back here before. He's actually spent the entire time I'm on the floor just packing a handful of dishes onto a dishwasher tray. The problem being that it takes ages to pack and wash and he hasn't cleared any space for my new dishes to be placed. I shit myself and ask him to help move stuff so I can set the new tray down. He flips it as if he's shocked I can't wash dishes in my own hands (bear in mind I've a tray of maybe 8 cups, teapots, icecream cones etc). He gets a space and the baristas start asking for cups. I start hand washing one to hand over and he scowls at me.
"Everything must go through the dishwasher.", and then he walks off to mingle at front of house again.
Alright mate. If you want it that way, then have it that way. I start packing up the dishwasher and try to organise the stacks of trays.
Not 2 minutes go by before 4 baristas are screaming for cups and teapots. I just have to tell them bosses new rules.
Boss now flies in and whips open the dishwasher before it's done telling me to start handwashing again. I start handwashing and he immediately follows with, "There are tables out there with dishes."
I had been pretty frightened of him to now, but having seen him start to lose his cool a little, it dawned on me that I was being overworked, and this guy didn't even know it yet. So instead of making any point or argument I realise the bast way to let him know is by showing him. I leave to get a full tray form out front. It takes a while to stack a few tables trays together, and while I was doing that he was sweating in the back following baristas cleaning orders, hand doing dishes as they were needed. Of course when I get back, there is again nowhere to put the trays and he's now scowling at everyone as if we had constructed the building ourselves.
Again when I say nowhere to put trays, I am including the floor, where trays were already stacked.
He then runs out when I get the trays unpacked into some stacks of dishes and he's back to the front of house.
I have then to start cutlery, anyone that's worked in a restaurant or cafe knows the bane of cutlery.
I'm nearly done scrubbing cutlery clean when Boss reappears and without looking pours coffee and tea onto my cleaned cutlery in the sink. At this point I can see he's defeated. He knows how precious my time is suddenly and he knows he's just fucked me over by doing that. His eyes are just wide with an aura of fuck.
He walks back out, still holding the now empty mugs and leaves me to start the cutlery anew.
Maybe a minute goes by when he walks back in and just asks me to tell him how I do my job.
FUCKING FINALLY!!
I wash and talk, telling him all the little tricks and tips for making sure shit is still moving out the front. I can tell now from his face as I relay how this place actually works that he genuinely didn't know. I can see somewhere in his head he's just realised how he must have been treating myself and other younger staff all summer to this point. He's sort of looking a bit broken. 15 minutes into working at his own cafe and he's broken.
The rest of the shift he had his wife come down and the three of us worked the full shift to close. At the end of the day he actually apologised for making me work like that and he'd always have staff on the accommodate busy shifts. I actually went to work for him every summer after that until I left college. I actually really appreciated his reaction to that day and always did a little extra than I needed to and in return he always paid me a little better for the extra work.
TL;DR :Boss overworks me to death only to have to do the job one day with me and realise what he's been doing.
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