I am coining this term on June 30th,2014 10:14PM: Job Security Lost in Obscurity.
I have a summer job at this excellent local restaurant, and I was given the job based on few pretenses. My boss gave me the job based in his intuitions I believe and his willingness to help out a student. I wanted to earn money this summer and also pick up a few profession skills along the way. I absolutely love school and know I still have much learning to do, yet I am eager to join the work force. I feel like working on a real team at a real job gives you valuble experience that is crucial.
I have already learned so much about food and preparation from my co-workers and my boss, I get to experience the process of creation; every night we put out unforgettable plates of Kurdish cuisine. Besides the food, I have come to understand the importance of communication in a workspace. Especially in a fast-moving environment of a restaurant, relaying the orders and instructions what make or break the flow from the kitchen to the front.
I enjoy working with everyone on the team and learning in the kitchen has been only a positive experience, but there are also challenges for me. The struggles are mostly about speed and performance under pressure. I am still harnessing those two skills, as they are not inherent in my personality.
One of my coworkers Martha, is a vision of both speed and excellence. When I see her work, I am genuinely floored. She chops tomatoes at top speeds and can dress a side of hummus in 30 seconds and make it looked properly garnished. She is one of our team members who works with such vigor and stamina. She is much older than me and is raising a 9 year-old daughter. I don’t know her life or circumstances very well at all, but I do know that she works incredibly hard with a resilience through back and foot pain that is admirable.
Though she would not seem to be the first person to be recognized as an inspiration by the majority, she is an inspiration to me. It is a shame that people working in kitchens and doing ‘manual labor’ jobs do not get the proper recognition or compensation often (that is another discussion for another time!).
I don’t know If I will ever be able to top her speed or match her in her combo of speed/accuracy in the kitchen. I do a good job in all of the same places that she performs, but because of her speed X accuracy, I think my boss sees her as indispensable and me as replacable. My boss is a kind man and has told us that he appreciates everyone on the team. Even so, he is still a business man. And I do think that it is a logical conclusion for him to make, considering he very well knows I am leaving for college in the fall.
This post was spurred by my own selfish anxieties. The anxiety materialized once he told me not to come in this week because he was ‘training a new person’. I think I might be over-dramatizing my employment situation by saying it is JOB SECURITY LOST IN OBSCURITY. Though I don’t know exactly what he intends to do in the coming weeks with the kitchen staff, my job security still feels like that:lost in obscurity. It may only be a summer job, but right now it feels like a part of evaluation on my worthiness as a worker on a team. To me, that is a big deal, and calls for some dramatics. It would not be devestating to me that I would lose a certain amount of money, rather, it would be the idea that my boss would not find me to be indispensable.
If that short, 10-word text message (from my boss at a summer job that pays 50¢ over minimum wage) is enough to make me question my worthiness as an individual, I can only imagine how it would be if I got a call (from my manager of 10+ years at a job with benefits with a wage that actually pays for your bills) to tell me I was to be layed off.
I guess the best way to combat such anxieties is to not see your job as the sole value of your life. It is false to feed into the idea the value of an individual is determined in a certain job at a certain business, because it is one out of a million groups you could contribute your personality and skills towards!
-Emma
*Next post will be more’s structured and less stream of consciousness, I swear!
emmatheish 