As the Burger Turns part 11

Wednesday, July 15th,2020 at about 4:30 a.m. or so.

I took a tour of Northwest Georgias finest Medial Facilities for the last two days. I'm beaten up tired. Sorry, its sorta short today. Oomph.

On this day 20 years ago in a couple of hours, I became a Grandpa for the first time. I was only 42 or so and thought I was too young to be called that name so I opted for something else until my wife gently reminded me that it wasn't really up to me, that the womenfolk and the grandkids ultimately decide who gets called what. They decided that she was too young for example to be called Grandma so they opted for Nana for her, and because it didn't matter what I thought, not a tiny little bit, shut up and go get coffee or sit down and go amuse yourself, I am called PaPa. I like it anyway, and love to hear my actual and pseudo grandchildren call me that name. Hell, I would probably answer to anything if one of them said it, Anything except can we have money that is.

So anyhow, having said all of that, Happy Birthday, James Bishop!!
Papa loves you and misses you every day.

Disclaimer: The title of this post is the start of my soap opera for old people called "As the Burger Turns"  Anyway, to make this clear right from the start, everything in this post is created from my own recollections, which may be faulty because I am old, or because I choose to lie about it, take your pick. At any rate, everything I post here belongs to me, the good the bad and the ugly, and is a product of my highly developed imagination. If I use a situation that you know about and it was actually different, then shaddup! , just read it and don't ruin a good story with a correction about some trivial things called facts. It's a story, stories are based on what people think and everybody knows that people lie.

I post that disclaimer on the Steak `n Shake stuff because I know eventually I will get it wrong and somebody will want me to correct it. I don't want to spend all day fact-checking my memories so hell to the no, I won't go.

So anyhow when we last left our intrepid young restaurant manager, he had been appointed the GM at a tiny ass little store at 4105 E. Washington St know affectionately as Little East, where if one did a DNA analysis of the underlying soil in that location I am sure you would find gallons and gallons of sweat just soaked into that soil because of how hard you had to work there to cook a burger and then get it served. 

A lot of people didn't make it after being assigned there because of the effort it required due to the lack of staffing created by the lower sales volume. Its an anachronism of the restaurant business that most if, not EVERY company has sliding budgets that are based on your sales volume. Almost none of them take into account the effect that a very low sales history has on the ability to deliver quality products in a reasonable amount of time. I know that things are not like back "in the good old days", but it is sorta ridiculous then and now to expect a 5-minute service from a 60-foot production line where the manager and maybe 3 other people are making an extensive SKU heavy menu. 

So anyway day after day you come to work at 0 dark hundred, do whatever paperwork you have to do to get the store ready to open, get yourself and the staff assigned various tasks that make the store ready for business. You have to get the preparation line stocked, tools and implements put on each respective station, clean everything, stock each station with food and condiments (based on whatever daypart is being prepared), run whatever reports, place any orders for future delivery that are needed and all the misc tasks that come up in this time frame. Before we started serving breakfast this was about 60-90 minutes of prep time and after we started it was about 30-90 minutes because A lot of time we were open while this was going on. 

This is where the secret and the science of staffing a store merge together. You wanted the very best people to work for you however sometimes that was the secondary characteristic you looked for because it was occasionally better to have somebody who would bring their ass to work no matter what, than it was to have someone who was a great cook, but would drive you crazy with their reliability issues even if the issues were legitimate. For example, I once had a super-duper prep/breakfast cook who was just about the best cook I had ever seen, except she was late or missed work all the time because she had a special needs child that affected her ability to meet her schedule on a regular basis. It made me nuts trying to figure out how to accommodate her and take care of the business needs at the same time. It also drove the other employees nuts covering for her and making up for her when she missed a day.

I remember actually discussing this with my District Manager while I was a tiny bit frustrated about it and talking it over with my peers in meetings a few times by asking their opinions about what they would do. I got good advice from my peers and also learned that it was usually a bad idea to ask your boss how to solve problems in the store because he usually had a dumbass answer that didn't help any, or at least it didn't help me at all. My peers had several creative solutions and I ended up using one of their suggestions to solve the issue enough so that everybody was happy and the work got done. 

That's really all I cared about. Did the work get done? Were the jobs accomplished? If you could answer yes, then I say go get another cup of coffee and move on to the next problem. I was incredulous when my boss told me I should let her go and tell her to file for unemployment and then just let her have the unemployment check as it would fix my problem and she would still have money until she found another job. She was a great crew member who had a special needs child and his compassionate answer was fire her and let her have the unemployment. What a great human he was. 

Can you believe that? It really pissed me off to hear that but in my defense, I didn't say anything because I knew if I did, it wasn't going to be professional, calm, or polite. 

Better I just shut my face.

I think this is why I have been told I didn't have the "Killer-Instinct" required that it took to get to the next level of supervision because I thought stuff like this was cold-hearted, bad management, and just plain stupid. It also reinforced for me how I used to think the dumbest people got promoted to DM in the first place. It seemed like a dumbass contest to me and that wasn't dispelled until years later when a fella named Ed was made District manager and I thought he was pretty brilliant. I do remember and wondered if they knew how smart he was though, and thought maybe when they found out (they being the Division Manager or others like or above him) they would be unhappy because it was pretty hard to manipulate Ed and feed him bullcrap. 

Turns out I was wrong about that too but that's a different story for another day.

Anyhow, I was sorta just stunned and stood there with my mouth open dragging the floor, thinking to myself "Are you really this stupid"? Then it dawned on me that I was the one that was the dumbass for bringing it up to him, to begin with. I forgot the rules of operation I had created for myself. Rule #1 was "Never ever forget who or what you are dealing with.", and being as I already thought he was a dipshit before this and that he was one of those guys who was more worried about looking good rather than being good, I don't know what was going through my mind when I asked him about this in the first place. It was a stupid move on my part. I remember saying "Thankx for the advice" and moving on to something else. Anyway, I didn't take his advice, I did not let her go and came up with something else entirely different. I asked the employee if she could make plans to come in or stay late one day and talk to me sometime in the afternoon. I made it simple enough and couched it in terms soft enough so that she wasn't left wondering if she was going to be fired because I had said something like "I need to talk with you at 4 o'clock tomorrow afternoon."

The next week she made arrangements to come in for a sit-down, I made arrangements to have all the bases covered so I didn't have to jump up every ten minutes to run the store and we explored solutions to the problem. Here is the funny part. She already knew it was a problem, she already had been thinking about how to fix it and she had already figured out how to fix it before she even sat down. I sort of began the conversation by telling her that the store had a problem however I also thought she was a wonderful employee and wanted to talk to her about it. She smiled, teared up a little bit, said she had wanted to talk to me about a problem she had too, and wanted to know if it had to do with her schedule interruptions? When I sort of acknowledged that yes that was what it was about, it almost seemed as if a weight had been lifted off her shoulders. 

At this point, I was worried that she was going to resign because she looked so relieved.

Instead, she told me the story about how she never wanted the heavy responsibility of being an opening employee but she loved working for Steak `n Shake and had a family history going back to her Grandmother who had worked for the brand and didn't want to jeopardize her job or do anything to get fired. She said she knew it was hard on the store covering for her all the time and it made her sort of unpopular with some of the other crew because she was always ruining someone's days off. She also said she had been trying to talk to someone about her proposed solution (I had been here about 2 months at this point) through the last 2 General managers and they never stayed long enough or seemed interested enough in fixing the problem. She said she had worried and worried about losing her job to the point that she thought her husband was going to make her quit because of all the self-imposed stress she has put on herself. Keep in mind dear reader I had not said a word to her about the problem before this day, not a single word.

So I said in the softest voice I could use and still be heard, something to her like, "I'm all ears, tell me how do we fix it?"

Keep in mind there are really three elements to the problem. 

1. One was when she was scheduled to "Open" meaning one of the first employees to arrive, whenever she had to call in because of her child, it created a hole in the getting ready schedule.
2. Two was when she was the cook, you had to replace the cook, for breakfast, which let's face it, was impossible, You would just have to do it yourself. If anyone ever saw me cook breakfast, you would immedialtely know what that's a bad idea. 
3. Three when she as the food prep person, somebody had to do food prep. So If she was forced to call in for the entire shift, you were screwed, and no matter how good she was when she was there, you were screwed when she wasn't. It turns out that one day when the DM was there running the store because the previous GM had resigned, he got stuck by this and the day was a nightmare. It was a gloriously bad day for everyone, and that was why he didn't like her. 

Like I said he was short-sighted, a part of the promote the dumbest people you can find campaign, and didn't like for his hair to get messed up, so as far as he was concerned she had to go.

I simply sat and listened to her as she laid out the solutions as she proposed them and it was so elegant and clean it was beautiful. It wasn't what I thought it was as I didn't know about a sister, however, she was keeping in her mind the store and using the exact same number of crew hours as before she proposed these things, this is basically what she came up with although I don't exactly remember all that was said, it was something like this. 

1. One -Was to allow her to shift some of the more labor-intensive chores to the evening shift and she would come in at night and complete these tasks after the kids were in bed and as she only lived down the street (about 3 blocks away), it wasn't a burden on her at all. 
2. Two -I should hire her little sister who was looking for a part-time job to help pay the bills. She said I will train her and make sure she can do the job as well as I can. 
3. Three -Let her sister stay come in her place and then stay through lunch when she could not be there which would replace her on the schedule and nobody would be inconvenienced. In these three ways the problems would be solved, she would keep her job, her sister would get a job, the store would run and everybody was happy. I was skeptical at first because of several things but told her I would think about it and wanted to interview her sister.

A couple of days later her 16-year-old sister sat down across from me and gave one of the best job interviews I ever conducted. She was nervous as all get out and stumbled though the answers a little, but man! the energy, the passion, the enthusiasm, you couldn't beat it. I hired her and began the process of training her and etc. Let the paperwork begin!

I remember a few days later as I was talking to her older sister why she had never brought her up to apply before this and she told me that before I start cleaning the house and getting rid of the thieves and etc she didn't want her sister working there. It just goes to show you, it is true to say the crew knows everything that goes on if you just listen to what they have to say. I can honestly say I learned this skill as an assistant manager working with Bill Duncan at East 38th street because he was always telling me to shut up and listen, and it always paid off for me whenever I remembered to use it. 

Later on, both Jackie and Virginia said it was a no brainer hiring her sister because she was as good or better than her older sister ever was. I felt like a genius and know I didn't do anything to fix it except nod my rubber neck and say "Good idea, let's do it." I never had an issue with her after that, it always got solved, the work always got done and my clueless DM? He had no idea how I pulled it off.

He never understood it. 

I'm a genius! (Yeah right)

-BigMike

BigMike's Rules for Good Operations
 Rule #1 "Never ever forget who or what you are dealing with."

 Rule #2 "Never ever provide the ammo for the gun to shoot you with"

 Rule #1 "CYA is not good enough, It has to be CYAA (Cover Your Ass Always)"