He drives us nuts with all his demands. He breaks your balls during meetings. He makes me take some housemen off the schedule 'cause "he knows better than me" that I don't need that many men on Tues or Saturday. He wants those reports done yesterday. What a royal pain in the ass... Then it got worse.He made me come in two Sunday's ago to babysit the brunch in the Restaurant. "Hey Banquet Manager", he said. "I need you to come in to help out with the brunch buffet this Sunday", he barked. "But boss, I'm off that day", I moaned. "Not anymore" was his response.
"I have a bunch of VIP's coming to the brunch and I don't trust that lazy-ass to get it done", came next. That "lazy-ass" is his newest way to refer to the restaurant manager. Nice girl, but she's outta her league. She's been on the hot seat for a while and now I need to cover her department too? WTF !!!
Now I gotta change my Sunday plans so I can come in at 7am to setup the brunch buffet and deal with all the equally-lazy ass restaurant waiters (the group here are the worst).
So Sunday morning comes and I'm changing the setup of the buffet tables. They don't have any idea what they're doing. I'm running for my special linen and props, making tiers and adding all the finishing touches. Where's the restaurant manager? Shit if I know!!! Later I find out that the VIP group is a table of 10 arriving at 10am. Good, let them come in early and get the hell outta here so maybe I can sneek out early myself. Of course it never happened.
It's now 11:30am and no VIP table. Then we get a call from the G.M that the VIP group is running late. But, there's always a but, and he now wants another table of 6 placed right next to the 10 top. We need to move a few tables around and piss off plenty of brunch guests so we can fit in another table for 6. This is where he wants to sit with his party. Twenty minutes later he arrives and walks around the room checking-out the buffet, never sits down, just walks around the room pointing out the food to his guests.
Then the best happens..."Hey Banquet Manager, the groups not coming in after all, something came up", he says. "Not coming in...what happened" I say. "I don't know I just gotta leave too", slithers out of his lips. "Hey, where's "Restaurant Manager" he asks. "Probably sleeping in the basement at this point", I say. "Don't be a wise-ass, I'll see you tomorrow, right?" he snaps as he walks out the door with his guests.
What the f^*@ happened? What's with the VIP group no-show and why the hell did he bother to come in with his group and not even stay? I'm the damm banquet manager not the restaurant manager...WHY THE HELL AM I HERE !!!!!!!
Related Stories:
Next Post: Breast Feeding In The Restaurant
15 comments:
I think this restaurant manager is out the door this week unless he plans on making you both the BM and RM all in one. Not a chance of that happening! She will be gone soon.
Maybe you are getting a promotion to be in charge of all food services.
Crap like this is why I refuse to have a cell phone or an answering machine.
Waiter - She'll be gone and I'll get stuck with the restaurant, sure...
Joe - A promotion, yeah right !!!
Anonymous - You've got the right idea.
Mmmmm. It is a shame that there are people like this out there. It is not even an indication of whether or not he is a good GM, but that he is just a nasty person. Such people should never rise to any position of power. It is a pity that hospitality seems to encourage such arrogance and poor communication. PS, Am I still one of your assistants? I've been gone for a week and haven't had a chance to visit.
Sorry boss.
James - Who gave you a week off? I didn't approve your vacation!
Gotta say this was always a problem I have had with GMs, and others I know do too.
The worst are the corporate managers though.. the kind that treat you like rotting meat
He always does that stuff because you let him.
You let him not do his job which is finding competent managers to run the outlets.
And you let him suck the life out of you because he can.
I don't know what the solution is because I found it was easier to walk away--and pay for three years of retraining while forgoing a salary--than it was to fight for a fair shake because I fought for that for ten years.
I'm still paying off those bills but my options at the time were:
--open a vein in the bathtub and be done with it.
--spend the next thirty years earning no respect in thankless soul destroying work while my marriage deteriorated and my kids never got to see me on holidays or weekends or nights. (So, when?)
--get out while I could and make the best of the only life that I have.
And I don't miss it.
I wake up every morning happy that I'm taking my kids to school.
Happy when I get home around supper time.
Happiest at work knowing that there are so many bad things in a day that I don't have to endure anymore.
As well as being totally into what I'm doing.
Happy on the weekends when I get up around eleven to make 'brunch'.
And I don't miss my esteemed colleagues in management, like:
The clueless housekeeping manager who thinks he is the boss when the truth is that the female hyena assistants were running that department ruthlessly for years before him, who don't respect him and make his employees lives a living hell. His only function is to make the schedule and add to his waistline at lunchtime in the restaurant when the actual customers are there, too.
The divorced front desk manager who thinks the world revolves around her department. (It in fact revolved around mine:)) She lives in the basement suite of her fathers house with her children, miserably. And at work she goes to great lengths to assert her self perceived superiority by bullying underlings and co-managers alike. She doesn't realize how angry she is and that she's covering her blatant self loathing and insecurity over flunking out of school years ago before she had kids. Oh, and she's three hundred pounds and has been on a diet for twenty five years. And she always asks for a special meal and a diet coke at company functions.
The Chef. Well chefs are a different breed. They think they are smarter than everybody else. In some ways they are until or unless they get fired for gross misconduct. Mostly though, they pay lip service to food quality. Having suffered many many bouts of food poisoning while having a company food account I can tell you otherwise. They are masters at pushing out mediocre food while blaming the restaurant manager for service standards and low guest satisfaction scores. And protecting their turf. Even when they routinely fail to read the daily and weekly recaps and you have to remind them that the guarantee has gone up on a function they come out smelling like a rose. Mostly because they know how to scramble. I got jaded after a while of being let down. I always checked the numbers on the kitchen contracts to see if they matched my own. If I noticed their numbers were off because they were too lazy to read the recap I would wait until they had to panic before telling them. It amused me to watch them scramble.
The sales manager who has never held a job at another property. She's a master at lying and deceit. It's all about covering her ass. And she never gets called on it. She's so hard done by with her nine to five job and her four full time employees. She would also work nine to five if she knew how to do her job properly. Instead she whines that she has to stay late to complete that function proposal when she really needed to skip that two hour lunch in the restaurant while the real customers were trying to get a table. She could get a lot more work done if she would just say what had to be said in department head meetings. She, too, is insecure and talks too much as a way of establishing her authority. She thinks her purpose is to enforce standards in my department. And that because she is management she is better than the little people. She never will understand that her only purpose is to write contracts for me and to get the hell out of my way. Her biggest downfall is that she thinks sales means waiting for the phone to ring.
Maintenance manager. I can't dump on this guy too much. He's usually some poor alcoholic bastard who can't get a job managing a building for a real company. He's overworked and underpaid. No, I mean really. His biggest downfall is that his department is not maintenance but fixitwhenitbreaksattheworsttime. Proactive he's not. And he can't be. He doesn't have the resources. I too have dealt with my fair share of soaking ceilings. And inadequate air conditioning. But I blame the gm for that.
That said, there were a lot of people I worked with who were just trying to do the best they could day after day.
My heart remains with them.
Dance dance - I LOVE IT! Thanks.
Hi
I like this post very much. It help me to solve some my work under my director’s requirements.
Apart from that, below article also is the same meaning
General manager job description
Tks again and nice keep posting
Rgs
I am actually a meeting planner and I find your blog very interesting. I don't see what goes on behind the scenes, and reading about what our withholding of information, or lack of organization does to the staff will help me to understand how to make all of our jobs go more smoothly.
Hospitality can be hell sometimes.
I completely stumbled on to this site by accident. The last fourteen years of my life have been committed to the restaurant business. The last seven years as the General Manager of a Nightclub/Events Venue and a restaurant. I feel horrible reading your "brunch" post,it makes my stomach turn. I think Dance...dance to the radio says it best. A general managers position can entail a number of stresses that hamper good communication and a nurturing environment. That being said the business is filled with people that would rather be doing something else or are out to make an easy buck. It starts at the top with ownership and rolls down the chain of command. Two months ago I was let go after 3.5yrs of loyal and dedicated service, for no other reason than, "I wanted to make a change and the change is you." Luckily I had a heads up from a very good friend and was waiting for it. Now three and half years is not a long time, but when you work the way your supposed to I think the years double. I was consistently asked to do more with less, rarely provided any management tools and never actually allowed to make significant decisions. I received bonus once, my budgets were constantly changing due to the ownerships desire to do something new without ever giving any consideration that he was impacting my entire teams ability to be fiscally successful. My schedule constantly changed due to some necessity that the owner's thought was more important than my new wife and eventually my first child. My decisions were constantly questioned even when empirical evidence was made available that it was a good decision. Very rarely were any of the reported statistics, very hard to make those incorrect when they come from the owner himself, given any sort of credence. Sorry for the rant. Needless to say it can be a very difficult job with very little reward, I am not however saying this is the case with your GM.
I am now looking at a complete career change much like Dance... suggested. The middle of my life is about to begin and I am going to start rewriting the book. What did you do Dance...?
Post a Comment