My Cat Could Do That

Saturday 5th September 2009
It was not an over busy day at the Café today, but certain members of the Saturday staff still managed to raise Ians blood pressure.
You lot can laugh, but this is the sort of thing that Ian has to put up with virtually every Saturday, and the staff we have are supposed to be intelligent, well educated, sensible people, the people that are going to run this country in years to come and make it the envy of the world, NOT!
Quote of the day comes from an individual who has been working with us in the kitchen every Saturday for a year, when faced with an order for a bowl of soup.
Picture it, the soup is in the saucepan sitting on the cooker, the flame on the cooker is alight and the saucepan is sitting above the flame, Ian is out on the counter rushed off his feet, trying to keep up with the coffee orders while keeping an eye on the member of staff that is on the till in an effort to limit the number of cock-up’s.
At this point the member of staff charged with warming up the soup and putting it in a bowl, walks from the kitchen to the front counter and in front of a queue of customers at the counter says to Ian “how do I know when the soup is hot”, from the way the question was asked it was obvious that the person concerned wanted Ian to go into the kitchen and give a practical demonstration.
Ian was not amused and let it be known, the fact that liquid bubbles in a pan when boiling hadn’t even occurred to them, assuming they knew in the first place.
Ian pointed out that the individual concerned had been doing the job for a year, albeit only one day a week and it wouldn’t always have been soup of course, sometimes it might have been beans or potatoes, but there are certain things that link them all, like they all warm up in a pan when put on the stove over a burning flame and the liquid element has a tendency to bubble when it reaches boiling point, which is generally considered to be a good indication that something is hot.
Ian reckons that with training for five hours every Saturday plus the odd midweek shift, our cat would have mastered it by now and we are relying on these people to look after us in our dotage, best hope there is a massive swing towards eating foods raw, served at an ambient temperature.
We finished work at a reasonable hour and spent the evening working on a new takeaway menu.