Multitasking, Scapegoats, Labor Laws, and a Bad Brain Day

This was a bad day, but in some ways it was funny. It's funny if I assume that I'm not really in trouble. I got reprimanded for something that happened yesterday. I don't know whether they just needed to vent their frustration at a scapegoat, or whether they all really believe that I did something wrong.

Yesterday we had to make a whole bunch of salads in preparation for a sale going on today. I had to make 30 salads, and do my usual cleaning (which takes about 2-1/2 hours if I'm lucky) between 2 and 6 pm, when the store would close early because of New Year's.

Well, I should have said no to that right away. I should have known that it is not possible to make 30 salads, and do the usual cooking, and helping customers, and cleaning up, in four hours.

In fact, my manager offered me a choice between doing the 30 salads, or doing some other sandwiches and things for the case. She said she would do the salads herself before leaving that day, while I did the sandwiches.

But I had a feeling that what would happen is that she would start the salads, then have to go home, because she was trying to get out on time without going overtime. There was not much time left before she had to leave. So the salads would be left sitting out, and I would be in the middle of doing sandwiches, and then I would have to go finish the salads, or do something with them to at least get them into the refrigerator for the next day. Basically she didn't have enough time to complete them before she went home, and she would have had to abandon them, partly done.

I am inserting a paragraph here because I want to mention that I don't blame the manager for what happened. In fact, I feel sorry for her too. Our department, and all the departments, got our hours cut, so we don't have enough people or enough time to do anything. It's hard to find people who can work in the evenings, too. And we all get in trouble for getting overtime. So when it was time for her to go home, she had to go. She couldn't stay any longer to work on the salads. And it would have been a long, long time, too - not just five minutes or something. She would have had several hours overtime. No matter what choices we made, she still had to leave, and I would have to finish the salads by myself.

Well, instead of saying no, instead of questioning the entire plan, instead of telling her that I had a bad feeling about this, I said something like, "!!!YES!!! I HAVE SUPER POWERS!!! I CAN DO ANYTHING!!! PILE IT ON!!!" Actually, I was much less enthusiastic than that in real life. I just calmly said 'okay, I'll do the salads,' as though this was normal. So I started working on the salads, while she worked on the couple of sandwiches for the case, since I knew she could realistically get those done in the short time before she had to leave.

She left, and I worked on the salads, and then did my cleaning and everything else. By the end of the day, of course the salads were not done. They were partly done, but still had a long way to go. Neither one of us would have had time to get them done. If she had started them, she would have had to go home before they were finished, leaving them for me. And when I did them, I had to abandon them in order to do the usual cleaning and shutdown routines.

Well, I put the unfinished salads into the cooler, and suppressed my feeling of anxiety. Then I did the cleaning and went home. I told myself that somehow, by some miracle, she would be able to finish them in the morning. I thought that maybe I would call her on the phone and tell her what had happened.

I did call her later on and left a message. But I didn't know how to explain it. It wasn't like anything unexpected had happened. 'Um, well, we got a bus, and all these people came in and they wanted ten pizzas, and the rest of them wanted sandwiches, and by the time they were gone I had to leave and I couldn't finish the salads.' It wasn't like that at all. It was just a normal day, but very short. And I had foreseen that it would be impossible to finish the salads.

So I just said something vague about how there wasn't enough time, and I somehow made it sound like this was an unexpected surprise, as though it had never occurred to me that the salads might not get done. But I had felt all along that it was impossible, and for some reason, I hadn't protested. Maybe I blamed myself, or maybe she blamed herself, I don't know. But I should have said from the beginning, 'Whoa, hold on, we can't get this done in this amount of time.' Neither of us could. Nobody could. But I said yes to it and then took the blame when it didn't get done.

When I came in this morning, there were cold shoulders all around. Apparently everybody had heard about the incident, about how my manager had had to finish the 30 salads herself when she came in, while trying to do all the other usual morning procedures, by herself. Everyone seemed cold. No smiles. Just an 'Oh, it's YOU' kind of feeling. Maybe I'm being paranoid, but that's how it felt.

My manager reprimanded me for not getting the salads done. I had left a message on her phone the night before, thinking to myself that maybe, she would receive the phone message and try to come in early, or something. I really didn't know what she could do about it. But I hadn't actually spoken with her. So she talked to me this morning and told me that I needed to learn how to 'multitask.'

It makes me wonder what HER managers are saying to her. And what are THEIR managers saying to them? Our hours are cut, and it goes all the way up to the top of the company, because they keep track of profits and sales and expenses and all that. And it goes even higher, up to the Department of Labor, in the government, because they're the ones who require companies to pay time and a half for hours worked over forty. Because of the time-and-a-half law, our employees can't work a couple extra hours here and there to help out when business levels vary. Instead, we have to hire lots of new people when sales are high, then cut their hours when business is slow, leaving them under-employed.

Well, today it went differently than yesterday. They called another co-worker in to help. It was her day off, but she came in. She wasn't close to forty hours, so she wouldn't get overtime.

When she came in, I tried to convey the message to her from my manager. She had told me to tell her: just make ten each of the Asian and Southwest salads, and five of the Caesar. But the other manager who was there sort of butted in between us and told her to make 19 of something (I didn't catch which one it was) and 15 of the other one, and I didn't hear how many of the other one. I think it was five Caesars. This was confusing. It was like I wasn't even allowed to convey a message from one person to another, because I was THAT incompetent and untrustworthy.

When we walked away, I told her that the other manager had actually wanted only ten, ten, and five. So she went back, looked at the situation by herself, asked the other manager what was going on, and then came back and began to made 19, 15, and however many of the last one.

She began at a little after 2:30 and did nothing but the salads all afternoon, with no interruptions.

An hour went by. She had barely begun. She was still setting up the containers, filling the little cups with chips and croutons, and filling the other little cups with salad dressing. (Note, I'm not complaining, this is normal for making salads. It takes a long time to prepare those items and set everything up. I was not surprised that an hour went by and she was still working on that. Salads just take a long time. She is a good worker.)

In my head I was shouting, 'Come on! It's been an hour! What's the problem! Multitask! Multitask!'

Let me point out here that multitasking is something you can do IF: one of the tasks has a waiting period of some kind, during which you would have done nothing but stand around. For instance, if you have to put something in the oven, and it takes four minutes to cook, then you can do something else during those four minutes while it's cooking.

You cannot multitask if both of the two tasks involve constant work. 'High-density' or 'compressed' tasks, so to speak. You are already working constantly without standing and waiting. For instance, doing the dishes cannot be multitasked with mopping the floor. You could, but it would be pointless. You could stop doing the dishes, then mop a little bit of the floor, then go back to doing the dishes. You'd have to walk a couple steps from one place to the other, which would waste more time and energy. It would have the same 'density,' except it would take even longer because of walking back and forth.

Another hour went by. I looked at the clock and it was 4:30. Yesterday at 4:30, I was at the stage of getting anxious because it was time to start the cleaning and shutdown routines so that I could get done by 6:00. That was about the time when I abandoned the partly finished salads and began the cleaning.

My co-worker right then had only gotten a little bit more done than I had done yesterday. She got a little more done because I was taking the customers and protecting her against interruptions. She had finished filling the containers with lettuce, had cut up the chicken, and was putting the rest of the ingredients on the Southwesterns. I think she had already done the five Caesars - I think it was five, just a small number. They're the quickest and easiest.

She had said that she could work from about 2:30 till about 6:30. It was informal, since she was here on her day off. But she was getting about the same four-hour period in which to do those salads... except she spent the whole four hours doing NOTHING BUT SALADS. She did not do all the cleaning and shutting down and all the customers and all the hot foods.

At 6:30 she was finishing up. She did more salads than I had to do, and she got all of them done. She did almost forty, while I had tried to do thirty. But she spent the whole four hours doing that, uninterrupted. And, again, I am not complaining. That is a normal amount of time for such a large project.

This demonstrates that it would not have been possible for me to do thirty salads, while also doing everything else. It is not because I am slow, stupid, incompetent, or unable to multitask. It is because it was impossible to do.

If I was to blame in any way, it was by being unassertive. I should have said something right away about how this was impossible.

I thanked her several times for coming in on her day off and helping. I had told her how humiliating it was to walk in and notice that everybody seemed angry at me. I needed sympathy. She said, 'I'm sorry you had a bad day.' She was nice about it. I wanted to give her a hug, but didn't, because I felt shy. She understood that the salads just couldn't have been done.

I told her: I made a mistake by saying yes when I should have said no. I said yes to doing something impossible.

So, the salads got done today.

I don't know whether I'm really in trouble for failing to get them done the day before.

***

I had a Bad Brain Day on top of all that, which was not what I needed. I made several bizarre mistakes and I wrote them down on a piece of paper. They were strange mistakes, silly things, and I didn't even know that I was making mistakes until after it was done. Sometimes I catch myself, but not today. These were clueless mistakes. Several of them were almost the same thing over and over again.

1. I made some hoagies to put out in the case. I used today's freshly made bread because it was on the rack right next to me. It never occurred to me that we might have the previous day's bread in the drawer and that I should use that bread first. I was all done with the hoagies, then noticed there was day old bread still in the drawer.

2. I ran out of lettuce while making the hoagies. I opened up a new bag of lettuce and used it, only to find that there was already some lettuce in another tray, and nobody had used it because it was in an unusual location. It was turning reddish-brown. Apparently I'm not the only person who accidentally forgot to use that lettuce, because it was already going bad. So that wasn't really my mistake. I wouldn't have used it anyway. But it's the principle: I should have at least found that old lettuce first. I only found it after I was done.

3. I ran out of onions. I went back into the cooler to get a new bag, and I opened it up and dumped some onions into the pan. I folded the bag shut and put it underneath in the cooler cabinet... only to find that there was already an opened bag of onions under there.

4. I ran out of tomatoes. Guess what I did. I went back into the cooler to go get new tomatoes. I used the new tomatoes on the hoagies, only to find out afterwards that there was already an unopened new container of tomatoes in the cabinet underneath.

5. This last mistake is different from the other ones, but just as silly. I opened a box of frozen pizza dough. I am supposed to label the doughs with a date that says three days from now, which is when it will expire. Today was the 2nd, so I should have written the 5th. Instead, I wrote today's date on every single dough. I noticed the mistake when I took the tray of doughs into the cooler, and saw that a couple doughs already in there were labeled January 3rd, expiring tomorrow. That didn't make sense, because all of my doughs said January 2nd... oh. Oops.

There were no serious mistakes, just silly ones.

****

Why didn't I protest against doing something impossible? This is what I felt: There is a feeling, an emotion, being passed downwards from the very top of the top to everyone below in the hierarchy. It's 'You're not good enough.' You're not fast enough. You're not competent enough. You're going to get fired. You're losing money. You should be able to do this, but you can't.

And I am sure it goes even higher than the top of our company. It goes all the way up to the national government. The law says that we have to do X, but X is impossible. Don't blame the law, blame yourself. Our papers must say 'We Made Profits!' They must also say 'We Complied With The Labor Laws!' If we don't make profits, our business shuts down and goes bankrupt. That's where the 'You'll get fired from your job' feeling begins. The 'You'll get fired' feeling gets passed down from manager to manager, all the way down to poor little me.

The other feeling is, 'Our contradictions are humiliating.' If you question the logic, if you say it can't be done or shouldn't be done (like multitasking, for instance, which couldn't be done in that situation), they feel humiliated. They know it can't be done. They feel that they have to say it anyhow. They don't know HOW you can do this, so they say something that doesn't make sense. If you ask questions, it makes them feel worse. Questions about 'How can I do this impossible thing?' make them feel stupid. And that feeling, too, goes all the way to the very, very top. It wasn't just my low-level manager above me. She feels that way, but it's not just her alone. It's everyone.

Well, today is almost over. I hope that I am just a scapegoat and that this was just a temporary stressful moment during our hour-cutting phase, and that it'll get better when our sales increase and we can all work more hours.