I Must Have Been Dreaming

This morning I awoke an hour early in an anxiety-induced panic. The reason? One of the most stressful dreams I’ve had in a while.

I was working at Brick Oven again - except this time I wasn’t a Manager, I was a waitress. I was feeling a bit nervous because I’ve never been a waitress before and nobody seemed keen to train me. I did my part to help open the restaurant and the next thing I knew, it was the evening rush. And apparently, this was my lucky day because a guest and his wife and small daughter came to the restaurant requesting to meet the owners and saying that they had traveled far distances to come and try the food that they had heard such wonderful things about. Well, of course the owners were notified and decided that they wanted to have dinner with this guest and his family at the restaurant that night. And who should the owners be, but the CEO and CTO of the company I currently work for (kind of a big deal). 

Well, before I knew it, the owners (my real life bosses) had extended a personal request to me that I wait on their table that evening. This came with the request that I not blow this for them – we needed to make a REALLY good impression on this guest who had traveled so far to come and sample the renowned Brick Oven cuisine.

Pressure was on. There I was, no experience in waitressing, and having to wait on the most important people/table in the restaurant. So I did my best to be pleasant and charismatic and I put on my million-dollar smile and took their drink orders. I got the drinks to them without any problems and when I asked if I could take their food orders, they told me that they had brought some Wendy’s with them because they were starving and they wanted to eat that first. So I politely suggested that they eat the Wendy’s while I put in their food orders and then by the time they were done, their food would be coming out of the ovens. They thought that was a great idea, so I took their orders and went and put their order into the computer to send off to the kitchen.

Meanwhile, I started stressing out about how I was going to carry all of the food on those giant server trays without spilling and I was trying to figure out how to get the little girl at my table to actually use the crayons and coloring stuff I had given her. Then, the thought occurred to me that I should probably have given waters to all of the people at the table, regardless of if they had ordered it or not. So I tried desperately to find some clean glasses to take them some more waters. No luck. All of the glasses were dirty. This was stressful, since I knew that I would need to be bringing them refills soon. But I left that task and went into the kitchen to check on their food status. At this point, they had been waiting close to 20 minutes for their food. I found the ticket and realized that the kitchen had completely disregarded it. So of course, in a panic, I started asking the kitchen manager what the deal was and he said that the ticket said the order was for tomorrow. I started freaking out and yelling and I think I may have even swore a little (yikes!) and told them to make the food NOW! Then I had to figure out how I was going to explain to my bosses who were trying to impress a client that it was going to be another 15-20 minutes before they got their food. I went to the table and started rambling something off while they just stared at me like I was a complete idiot.

And then I woke up – all anxious and stuff. And I still had another hour to sleep, but had a hard time going back to sleep.