it is the servers nightmare

It's been almost two weeks since I worked in a restaurant and almost a month since I've managed one. But I am still having "server dreams". For those of you who have done my job in the past you know what I'm talking about. The constant worry you forgot something for some table manifests into dreams about impossible parties, awkward road blocks to get your table simple things like water, doors in random places to knock over your tray. When your a manager the dreams are worse. Mostly server dreams make you feel like a rat running a maze. Manager dreams usually come with a nice strong heap of failure attached to them. 

My restaurant dreams seem to all follow the same pattern, I am a happy little FOH (front of house or floor manager) checking on tables refilling drinks and trusting my BOH (back of house or kitchen manager) to be doing their job. Then everything crashes, tables have been waiting 30 minutes for their brownie, people are restless and hungry, so I step back into the kitchen to help out. (For those of you who haven't ever had to step into a crashed kitchen to dig them out, let me tell you, it's not fun. Basically imagine so much chaos and information being thrown at you you feel like you just stepped into the heart of a tornado. There's massive amount of movement and yelling. You not only have to focus in the chaos you have to fix a moving changing puzzle. Restauarnt people have a lingo. Being in the weeds means you are so in over your head you can't see the light above nor a path to get and you don't have any sense of direction. Basically it's the worst feeling in the world. You have too many people wanting too many things in too many directions and your brain is full. Full to the max overload. When the kitchen is in the weeds, it's worse. You don't know what's cooking which table it's for or if you have enough fries down. The entire goal of every shift is to NOT GET WEEDED. Because when is happens it is hell to get out of.)  As a manager you get blamed for everything. And lovely patrons who don't care that you've been working for 10 hours and have 5 more to go, had three cooks out sick, you had to fire a server for being high as a kite when he showed up or that you've been trying your best to be 5 people doing 6 jobs all night all they care about is that they had to wait 25 minutes for their meatloaf and it didn't have enough green beans. And because it didn't have enough green beans and he was hungry and had to wait he would like me to know that it is entirely my fault and I don't know what I'm doing or how to run a restaurant. Thank you sir, I was unaware that I was such a failure. I appreciate the fact that you brought it to my attention. 

All this is to say my lovelies, be kind to your servers, bartenders, managers and cook staff. We are all human, we make mistakes. Please forgive us. Because trust me we are all dreaming through our guilt of forgetting your extra ranch three weeks ago. 

Now I for one and grateful I get to destress for a while and hopefully these dreams will eventually cease.