How I got tea bagged by the service industry
I got fired from a restaurant as a teenager for putting too many tea bags in a teapot. That might sound absurd now, but at the time it was quite upsetting.
I was a teenager who valued approval. I was academically ambitious, and I cared – quite a lot – that I got good marks. I had been told since I was young that I was clever, that I was really going places, blah blah blah. At a certain point, that identity had become the one around which my self-esteem depended.
I also had a nagging feeling that I was a bit spoiled and incapable of doing anything that actually involved any level of practical skill. Ask me to identify the ways in which language was being used to express key themes in an extract from Of Mice and Men and I’d probably be fine. Ask me to get a job in a cafe, or a bar, or a factory, or do pretty much anything that involves using your hands as much as your head, and I would… well, I probably wouldn’t.
I think, over time, I came to recognise this as a bit of a blind spot. I started to worry that I was on my way towards becoming what some might describe as a cosseted intellectual. The kind of person who has a ‘healthy’ CV and knows the word ‘crepuscular’ but whose lack of actual practical abilities would become painfully apparent in the first few weeks after the apocalypse.
Wanting to rectify this, at 16 I decided to get a Saturday job. This job – my first job – actually served as a relatively gentle introduction to the world of stuff-I-hoped-I-wouldn’t-do-when-I-was-older. It was working at the cafe in Woolworths. That’s right, Woolworths had cafes. And yes, they were exactly like what you’re imagining.
Working there was, on the whole, basically okay. The bosses and my fellow staff were genuinely nice, easy going people. A number of them became friends. And I think something about the fact that we were working at a cafe that most people didn’t know existed – or, if they did know, didn’t come to with particularly high expectations – made the job fairly low pressure. If people didn’t have the best dining experience in the world at Woolworth’s cafe, it didn’t really matter because, hey. Woolworth’s cafe.
That said: I still hated the job – obviously. It was boring, monotonous, on-your-feet-all-day kind of work, and it pretty much fulfilled all of the smug expectations I had around what this kind of job might entail. Also, as I feared, I was jittery-as-fuck while performing almost any part of it, especially those that involved interacting with the general public. As soon as I had to act as if I knew what I was doing in front of paying customers I became erratic, absent-minded and about ten times stupider than I actually was.
One incident stands out as illustrative. Since it happened sixteen years ago it’s popped up once in a while when I’m trying to get to sleep – presumably, just to remind me who I am, where I’m coming from.
I was working at the food counter. This job either involved serving the pre-made food that customers selected from the salad bar or breakfast selection, or making something if they ordered from the menu.
A customer approached the counter and my colleague took the order – a baked potato with cheese. Classic Woolworths cafe fare, and not a difficult dish to prepare. However: there was one complication. This item usually also came with beans. If you got cheese, you got beans. They went together. They were connected. But this customer didn’t want beans with her potato. She wanted cheese alone. This was unorthodox. But we were willing to accommodate.
I went about preparing the dish. I retrieved a potato from the tray. No beans. I cut it open so that it folded out into four segments. No beans . I applied butter. I grabbed a handful of grated cheese and dropped it on top. No beans. I then took a ladle full of beans and poured them on top.
I realised my mistake immediately, and owned up to it. ‘Ah’, I said. ‘I’ve put beans on! You didn’t want beans, but I’ve gone and put them on!’ The customer was perturbed, but I was willing to forgive myself. It was a stupid mistake, but it was an honest one. I resolved to fix what I’d done.
So: I put the unwanted dish to the side, and began again. No beans. I retrieved another potato. I cut it into quadrants. No beans. Definitely no beans. I applied butter. I threw on some cheese. No beans. Absolutely no – I took a ladle full of beans and poured them on top.
Depending on your perspective, what I’m describing may simply sound endearingly dumb. It’s a guy who, despite being told to do something, fails to do it twice in a row in quick succession.
But the way I see it, there’s something about the mechanical ineptitude with which I conducted myself. Something about the fact that, having fucked up, I then fucked up in exactly the same way moments later, even though the only thing I was focussing on in that moment was not fucking up again. That seems to symbolise something seriously wrong with me. It seems to imply that there’s some part of me that is so resistant towards any kind of work that doesn’t just involve sitting in a warm room and thinking that I subconsciously sabotage any effort to carry this work out. Even if the task, in that moment, simply amounts to: don’t add beans. Although I can laugh a little about this now, the primary emotions that come up when I think about that day are fear and shame.
However, this was just one occasion in the course of an employment that was actually otherwise mostly tolerable. I’d say the net influence of my time at Woolworths on my confidence was basically positive, despite isolated moments of trauma such as the above. There were parts of the job that I genuinely liked – even did pretty well. For example: washing dishes in the back room. I could do that. I could actually do that with some skill. I could wash dishes fast – get through a whole pile of them in record time. I made an effort to do it, in fact. To show my
colleagues: look, I might not be top of the league tables when it comes to not adding beans. But I can wash bowls and plates at an above-average rate!
Unfortunately, my time at Woolworths came to a premature end. A round of redundancies took place about three months after I started, claiming my and a number of my colleague’s jobs. Various disenfranchised members of the team then went to work at a local restaurant and bar called The Red Lion. And, seeing as I’d had a taste of life in the service industry and found it not altogether unmanageable, I decided I would follow. Why not? I thought. I’ve built up a little momentum. Let’s keep this convoy on the road.
Working at The Red Lion was different from the start. This was an establishment where things were actually supposed to be good. It had a proper chef, rather than a collection of teenagers and a microwave. It had a real menu, rather than words written in chalk on a blackboard. It had formal uniforms, instead of shit red polo shirts and aprons. It had nice food, rather than the kind of thing you’d probably have been given for lunch at primary school.
I was out of my depth from day one. My employers wanted things done well. If you mopped the floor, you actually had to mop it well. You couldn’t just mop some of it and then stop and think about how much you weren’t enjoying yourself. If you laid a table, you had to lay it properly. You couldn’t just put stuff out in a vague approximation of what you think your supervisor might have meant, and then run off before you were told otherwise. You had to carry yourself like a proper waiter – like someone who knew what they were doing and was there to help – not like a bored, incompetent teenage moron. It was tough.
Although I was hoping I could get used to it, I very quickly began to feel that, if I kept working here, something w as going to happen. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I was pretty sure it was going to force me to confront my lack of abilities in a way that my time in Woolworths had not.
That point arrived about a month after I started. And in my defense, this wasn’t a normal pot of tea.
It was a pot of tea using different tea bags than the ones I usually used. Different to… well, regular tea (tea that, I now know, is called English Breakfast, but when I was 16, was just called ‘tea’). How were they different? Honestly, I can’t completely remember. I’m fairly certain they were a different blend. I do know they were slightly more fancy than regular tea – slightly more expensive, even.
Beyond this, the details of what made them quite so extraordinary, quite such a challenge to make a pot of tea from, are hazy. Perhaps I’ve subconsciously repressed these details so I won’t realise it was basically just Earl Grey or something. Anyway, the challenge I found myself so cessated by was how many tea bags I was supposed to put in the pot in order to create the desired level of strength. What I was fairly certain of – and, again, I’m not sure why – is that it was more than you would put in a pot of normal tea. It might, I thought, even be twice that amount.
Now, reading this, a couple questions might occur. You might ask: why would you think this? Is there such a type of tea? Surely a tea that requires you to put in double the amount of bags as any other type of tea would be a very cumbersome type of tea to use indeed. I can’t provide a reliable answer to that question. All I knew was this was probably the case. Not definitely, mind. But I was pretty sure that you needed to use a lot of the stuff. A second, consequent question might then be: couldn’t you just ask someone for help? And the answer to that would be: no. That’s not the sort of thing that people with no practical abilities or common sense do, despite being the people who need to do it most. I couldn’t ask for help, because then someone would know that I didn’t actually know what I was doing. Better to try, and hope, and hide if needs be.
So! In went double the amount of teabags one would usually use, and, five minutes later, back came the teapot in the hand of a man who I had only spoken to once, but I quickly began to realise was the manager. Addressing the kitchen and waving the teapot, he wanted to know: who did this?
Again, I don’t remember much about my subsequent conversation with the man. It, too, may have been subject to the same process of repression as the nature of the tea that had gotten me into such trouble. I think he may have asked me to justify why I had done what I’d done. I think I may have tried to explain, and then begun to realise how stupid I sounded, and then trailed off. What I do remember are the words that ended the conversation:
‘If this is too complicated for you, you should probably just go home.’ Owch.
I looked around the kitchen to see my colleagues’ reactions. They looked away, but I could tell they didn’t really disagree.
What I would like to be able to say at this point is: Well. That was pretty embarrassing. Some memories are painful, eh. But, you know what? In the years that have passed since then, I’ve come to realise something. Maybe some jobs just aren’t for me. I might not be that practically minded – hah, I guess that’s pretty clear by now! – but I do have gifts in other ways. And hey. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe I’m enough.
But I’m not going to say that. Because, if I’m being honest, I’m not sure I’ve ever completely come to terms with being fired for putting too many tea bags in a teapot. That moment felt like it confirmed an awful lot of things that I had hoped weren’t true. That I am spoilt, and I am vaguely incapable, and that… well, some things are too complicated for me.
And, despite a decade-and-a-half passing since then, I’m not sure I’ve ever fully been able to un-confirm this. I stayed away from service jobs after that, fearful of going through something similar. I retreated back to the world in which I might more reliably receive validation: school, and then uni, and then the kind of jobs where you don’t have to move quickly or count things. In other words, I have become the cosetted intellectual that I feared I might. There is a part of my journey towards full personhood that I never completed. And on some level, I’m still embarrassed by that.
I suppose there’s an argument to say that, if this bothers me enough, I could go and get one of those jobs now and try to face my fears. Hand in an application to Pret and give myself a little exposure therapy. Maybe that would make an interesting conclusion to this piece: I went back, and you know what I realised? It was all in my head! The only thing I regret is that I took so long to find out!
But I’m not going to do that. Why? Well, in part, it’s probably because it doesn’t bother me enough. Although it’s a little lame and has clearly left me with a few unresolved issues, it (mostly) doesn’t affect me on a day to day basis. Perhaps that’s because I have managed to stay in employment that relies on my more natural skill set. Perhaps it’s because I’ve come to terms with the idea that, sometimes, it’s ok for things to be unresolved – to work on the parts of yourself that are already underway, and take a little perspective when it comes to the rest.
But mostly? Mostly, I’m never going back to the service industry because I’d still be really fucking bad at it. I would do something stupid, like put beans on a baked potato that isn’t supposed to have beans, or basically completely fill a teapot with tea bags. It would be really embarrassing, and it would be in front of people. I think it’s better for everyone involved if we just avoid that scene altogether.
-By Tim Butcher
