Saturdays are the WORST

Waking up twenty minutes before the alarm is nothing new. It happens a lot around here these days since I had to start setting an alarm again. Three weeks ago Applebee’s opened its doors once again to the public for dine-in. Being back has been different because I not only have been Host but I have been placed in a new position that I was really enjoying until this past Saturday.

For the last full week I have been the Sanitation Specialist. At this position I deep clean and sanitize all of the active tables throughout the building after each guest. While similar to the Host job description before it is different in the time it takes between tables. Each of the sprays I use has to sit on the table and chairs for a minute before they are to be wiped off for maximum effectiveness. That is three minutes a table. With there being twenty-four active tables and on the average Saturday doing each of them at least three times that is seventy-two tables adding up to 216 minute of work (3hours and 36minutes). That is not including the bathrooms which both also have to be deep cleaned and sanitized which takes me by myself about a half hour.  So in total I did four hours and six minutes of non-stop work on Saturday. That’s not a lot for you 9-5ers and I get that. This is manual labor though so by the end of the average day I am in so much pain I am numb.

Especially when there is supposed to be a second person helping you do said positions work load on a day like Saturday. The first guy that was there to be my second I heard take a phone call in the restroom first thing in the morning and proceed to tell our supervisor that he didn’t feel well and needed to go home. He left and they proceeded to replace him with an extra waitress they had on hand. She was present for the first hour and I am pretty sure I saw he bus one table which I proceeded to clean and sanitize. Then she comes up to me and says she will be going on break and having lunch with her family who came in to see her. Being that she was supposed to be the evening Sanitation Specialist I was fine because how much could my life fall the fuck apart in one hour…make it two. She sat down for lunch just after one o’clock that afternoon and by the time I saw her next it was after three. I told her I was fine but I clearly wasn’t. I told her I was upset about how another server was treating me and while that was more the truth it was a depressing combination of both. Not sure where she went after that conversation but I continued to clean the four tables in the section that I was in.

All this and the Hostess is nowhere to be seen so I go to sit two tables in which the one server informs me that he was double sat so lack of communication right there should tell you something about where this is going. I go back to my tables that need finished and I talk to the supervisor about the server that had been treating like shit all day. I tell her I would rather quit right then and there than ever work with her again. As soon as I finish with the section I was on I grabbed my things and stormed out the carside door with barely a word to anyone on the way out.

I clocked out at 4:08pm on Saturday. I clocked in at 10:52am. That is five hours and sixteen minutes that I was clocked into work for the day. So barely an hour and ten minutes of that was I doing nothing as that server suggested. Most of that time was the 11 o’clock hour after we first opened when I was just waiting for a table to clean. So 4:08 to 4:18 I am sitting in my car fuming. I am not only physically numb I am also emotionally numb. I have forgotten how to breath at this point. Ten minutes sitting in my hot car before I remember to turn it on and pull out of my spot. I don’t even remember driving there but I end up at my local Starbucks where I stop for coffee almost daily. I tell my friends who work there about my day and how I am shocked I wasn’t in an accident on the way there. I take my coffee and thank them for enduring my tirade about my day. I drive home and tell my mom in short about my day because she is one to not hear me when I am like that. She makes out to be being overly sensitive. My dad always just says, “don’t sweat the small shit, and its all small shit.” Both sentiments are useless to me when I am upset about anything big or small. Then I went up to my room to get out of my work clothes and proceeded to cry for the better part of twenty minutes. Then we had dinner as a family, mom and I watched a movie together and then I drank the rest of the night away until I woke up at 11:15 on Sunday which is my off day anyway.

Last night before I went to bed I checked out the site where the schedule is posted and saw that the server who thinks that, I don’t do anything in the job I have and don’t know how to do anything right and “don’t know what its like to be a server” (I walked past a conversation between her and another server and she deliberately said this louder and looked my way as I am passing through the dining room), is going to be working on Tuesday so I made the informed decision to drop my shift for that morning. Now as far as I know unless she switched with someone she is not supposed to be on today. I don’t really want to quit, especially since my mom pointed out I should have another job before I quite this one.

Sitting her at my desk looking down at my pile of duct tape works beside me I wish that I could just give up on the outside world and just run with my upstart but that’s a pipe dream I fear may never come true. Last week I added phone case wallet to my collection. I gave the first one to my boss because she just had all her credit cards in the pile the back of her phone case so obviously neither the phone or the cards was fitting properly.I have made three totes and two purses since quarantine started back in March and now I have made five phone cases.

Now seeing it is 9:30 I guess I should go get ready for work though.