Anatomy Of A Stupid.

Optimism

As a guy (I mention my gender because it’s two world’s difference if you’re a girl) who socializes to kill time, each and every day I find that my patience is tested by some of the saddest, sickest, stupidest and irritating people or things. No offence, or not meaning to boast, but it really is the truth! I bet it’s the same for the most of you too, college life really is more demanding than just reserving yourself, what more in the hospitality line.

Last Wednesday I had my group’s buffet dinner service. This was a pretty big ambitious project, with all 3 groups whom normally served on Wednesday night combining together to form one.. as per what Calvin likes to call it, a "Superestaurant". I was the manager alongside Calvin and Dida and we had 31 people under us, with 92 guests attending for the night. Sounds impressive, sounds only. In actual fact it was a bad case of a sunny side up cause we had all the time in the world to do preparations, and the three of us agreed to not give too much thought into deco as we wanted the buffet to work looking moderate, rather than lag looking good.

Nonetheless, I won’t bore you with grandmother stories on how the service went, instead I’ll just tell you related things that inspired me to write this post entitled Optimism. Before that, let me tell you how the idea of the title surfaced first! I was out with my classmate Jon for a yam cha session one night and you know, Jon’s only nice and lovey dovey to me on yam cha nights for some reason, so he told me a story about his friend Teoh Wei and sleeping with AIDS infected people. Long story short is if you’re infected with AIDS, then go screw other AIDS-kias la! Talk about optimism right? =P

So that’s how the title, the outlook-on-life changing term came and hit me right in the nose lor. Eversince then optimism always was the road I chose.

So onto the service. The first conflict I ran into was the fact that I didn’t have a white board to use to communicate with my mates. Vincent’s best friend Chef Bala came and took it away from me bloody half  way to dispose of it as I was writing the board and never replaced it with a new one. Ok nevermind, optimism kicked in and results showed. Taught me conflict management, to do a briefing with all the resources I had, and made me get to know the people I didn’t really know before better. 10 points for Andy.

Then came the second obstacle. I HAD to leave to get my kuih dessert, it is of no doubt that if the kuih did not present itself, the guests would have went AWOL over the deficiency of food, what more just desserts! Nevermind that though, so when I left at 5pm, I told the guys that there will be a briefing at 5.45pm sharp. But as I left for the car, I noticed that time was absurdly passing by faster than usual, so I asked Calvin to postpone the meeting to 6pm but he can carry on if I’m still not there yet by the time.

Instead, when I return at 6.05pm, I’m greeted by a havoc filled restaurant with student servers running around all over the show, a slightly upset Calvin claiming the whole restaurant was waiting for a briefing from me (hmm..) and at the corner of my eye, the thing I least wanted to see, lecturers making changes to the pre-approved restaurant layout.

Fine.

Optimism kicked in again and went around the restaurant checking in on people, helping out with the work and changes and so on and got happier as more work piled up. It’s funny how this feeling works because I’ve never worked this well under stress. Guess it goes to show that when you’re at ease in the mind, nothing’s impossible. 20 points.

7.20pm and there’s a couple of servers running around with casual clothes on, but at least finally the restaurant itself was in place. 7pm was the promised time we’d start service so you could tell guests were crawling all over the place already. Got my last chunk of optimism and used it, while having the extra last minute briefing on letting the servers know what to do (even though I missed out a couple of key information) managed to make them laugh a little. Great! People laughing are just as good as focused people so here we go. Service finally started.

Thank goodness service didn’t flunk, we got through the whole thing just well enough to not see customers walk out with a frown. Kitchen crew, well no, I should rephrase that, the people with the walkie talkies did their job right and efficiently so good job! Beverages had a slight technical issue at first but was resolved mutually, and by resolved mutually I just mean nobody gave a shit about the presence of wine glasses on one table and a high ball glass on another. 30 points!

Finally service ended, everyone’s happy and eating. Didn’t get to eat one thing, but it’s alright, this Wednesday I’m cooking anyway so I’ll get to eat then Went around the restaurant again making sure everyone who wanted to eat, ate. It’s pretty cool to be hospitable, makes you good friends.

Ah heck, who am I trying to kid, service was great! Making friends is great! Nothing related to studies ever pisses me off, it’s the lifeless people that cling onto others that annoys me. But hey, you wanna be dependent, so be it, just dont get in my way (which unfortunately you do most of the time, that’s why I’m so mhang-zhanged about it) and we’ll call it even.

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