Work Conflict

The conflict that comes to my mind was actually a recent one at work.  As you may already know from my older posts, I work as a server at a restaurant and with this job comes tons of different conflicts every shift.  These conflicts range from something as simple as servers arguing over who can take the next table or much larger conflicts such as arguments between my boss and some of the chefs.

I was actually not in this conflict but I was there the whole time to watch it unfold.  The sad part is that this conflict started with a computer glitch, which cause us humans to start getting mad at each other.  There are two restaurants where I work that share a kitchen and Dublin's, the restaurant next door, had a glitch in the POS (point of sale) system where all the tickets (orders of food) did not get sent to the kitchen for about ten minutes and after that ten minutes, they all came in at once.

This might've been okay on a slow weekday, but this was during the dinner rush on a Saturday night. As you might've already guessed, the servers were not very happy because now all this food was behind and their tables were starting to get antsy.  So when it came to the entire restaurant, it was the severs against the kitchen.  Aside from those conflicts, the main one that I remember was between my boss and the head chef.  Since everyone was stressing out, my boss went in the back to work the window (pretty much the guys who reads off the tickets and organizes everything so it is easier for the kitchen).  It was going good at the beginning, but once more tickets started to come in on top of all the tickets that had been backed up, my boss started to panic and get flustered.  Sadly, he took out his frustration on the head chef.  From my point of view, the head chef was doing a kick ass job (excuse my language) but apparently this was not fast enough for my boss.

He started yelling the orders to them, saying things like "Come on guys! We are at a 25 minute wait time for food to come out, we have to move faster!" From my point of view, it looked like they were going as fast as they possibly could.  It seemed like everyone was on the same page except my boss.  He has it in his head that the chefs just weren't moving fast enough and after a while of them getting screamed at, the head chef told me boss to calm down and that yelling isn't going to make them move any faster, it would actually stress them out more and cause more mistakes and delay, which I totally agreed with.

After he said that to my boss, he actually started to calm down.  But then the head chef got flustered and grabbed a hot pan out of the oven with no oven mitts.  He then dropped this pan full of some sort of sauce all over the kitchen floor.  That is when my boss lost it, he screamed, and excuse my language this is a direct quote, "Come on!! This is the bullshit I was talking about! We do not have time to for these stupid mistakes!!"

Mind you he was screaming this directly after the head chef burned his had from the hot pan and at this point, the head chef got pissed, said "piss off dude" and walked out of the kitchen because he did not appreciate being screamed at by his boss.

After a short while, the head chef came back and continued to work and finished all the orders with ease.  I thought it was a good idea that he walked out of the kitchen because it avoided any further conflict.  I actually also think that my boss knew it was a good idea too because he didn't get mad at the head chef for leaving.  By the end of the night, my boss apologized, saying he acted unethical and should not have gotten mad at the chefs because it only created more chaos.

The source of this conflict, I believe was the POS system but the way my boss handled it created another conflict that was unnecessary.  The reactions of everyone else, especially when my boss decided to scream at the head chef was mostly shocked and embarrassment because our customers could actually hear him screaming.

Could the situation been avoided? No, but the conflict could've definitely been avoided.  My boss was out of line for yelling at the head chef.  He could have handled the situation much better by not losing his cool and keeping the kitchen at a good pace.