The girl in the picture is not as tough as she looks.

Today was my first day on the hot sandwich line. As part of our Block 2 rotation, our class is in charge of making the salad bar, all of the dressings and mayo, special pre-packaged fancy salads, cold specialty sandwiches, and we run the short order grill. Our class has been separated into four teams of 4 or 5 and my team is working the line.

Within the team we each have an assigned job: taking orders, prepping bread, grilling meat, deep frying onion rings and french fries, and adding the garnish to each plate. I was on garnish today and boy did I learn a lot about me. I definitely need to work on my ability to listen and work. I focussed solely on the people in front of me. It was hard to listen to the orders being called and then understand what they had to do with my station at the end of the service line. As a team, we served 53 customers between 11:30 and 12:45. That's an average of 1 customer every minute and twenty-six seconds. Every plate got a small salad (coleslaw or ambrosia), a pickle, and whatever condiments the customer wanted (lettuce, tomato, onion, mustard, mayo, relish, fruit salsa).

All of the customers were very friendly and patient. One of them was even a former student. As I was serving a customer, I could hear a voice from the back of the line calling "Ng! Ng!" It was a pretty discrepant moment for me and I stopped what I was doing to ask, "Is someone calling my name?" My team didn't know what I was talking about since they all know me as Sarah. Finally I saw that it was Edward, a student from about 6 years ago. It was really nice to see a familiar face on the line. And I think that Eddy thought it was pretty funny that his grade 8 teacher was dressing his hamburger for him.

By the time we were finished and cleaned up, I felt pretty good about the job we had done. Tons of credit for the smooth service goes to Tyson and Matt who were stuck in front of the grill, flat top, and salamander. It was stinking hot where they were, but they just kept everything coming out in a timely fashion. And both of them, but especially Tyson, are extremely calm and rock solid under pressure. Like I said, when it was all done I felt pretty good. After school, I picked up some treats from the bakery and I headed to the bus stop with my pal and team mate, Marianne. Once home, that's when I found out what a wuss I was. Almost immediately, I had to climb into bed for a 2 hour nap. I think it's because I'm the oldest . . . and a big sissy.