And My Job Comes Crumbling Down

I promised you two in one day, so here goes the second!

I work at a dining hall on campus called Eva J's, and yesterday I had to work. On Mondays I work the slowest shift from 2:30 to 4pm. And yesterday the dish machine broke so we had to quickly take all of the dishes off the counters so students wouldn't use them, and replace them with paper products.

I got to work on it right away, and stacked plates and some bowls, and was working my way through the room. So we have these carts that we put dishes on, and they're all shaped differently depending on what size dish goes where. Someone had put a stack of about ten small bowls in a soup bowl slot, which is much too large for those bowls. Without thinking through the consequences, since I was in a hurry, I started putting the same bowls on top of those. And, you guessed it, as soon as I moved the cart, all of them came spilling out.

If you've ever wondered what dropping around 50 glass bowls sounds like, let me be the first to tell you, it isn't pretty and it is VERY loud.

All three managers were there, and came running to see what had happened. I was already in the process of cleaning things up and simply trying not to make the situation worse. Two of the bosses jumped right into help, while I went to get a broom. The other manager, well you can imagine that one.

Here's the most important part, and how the dialogue played out (names have been removed to protect, well, mostly myself):

Angry Manager: "How did this happen Kathy?"
Manager on the floor cleaning: "Someone must have stacked the dishes here and when she moved them, they all fell out.
Me: Oh, I wish. "No, there were a few there, but I stacked the rest without thinking about it, and they broke when I moved the cart."
Angry Manager: "I'm really disappointed in you Kathy, you were supposed to be helping fix the situation, not make it worse."

So you see from this how VERY easy it would have been to just be like, you're right manager on the floor cleaning, that IS how it happened. But I couldn't do that. Even crying and stressed out and upset as I was, I didn't want to put the blame on someone else who might have gotten in trouble for it. Damn my parents for raising me right!

Anyway, so I finished cleaning up the incredible amount of glass on the floor, crying the whole time. Not to mention that anytime someone said something about it, I started crying again. I felt like an idiot, but when I genuinely feel sorry for something, I tend to cry. It's a very traumatizing habit.

I pretty much assumed I was going to be fired, and when I was done with the shift, I approached one of the managers, said I was sorry again, and offered to pay for it. She was WAY too nice about the whole thing, said it happens to everyone, and her and another full-time worker who is super sweet hugged me until I stopped crying. Angry manager had left at that point, but I'll see her at work again today. Yikes.

Anyway, I learned a lot from this whole thing. Mostly, I won't be making any rash decisions anytime soon, but I guess you can say that something like that does happen to everyone, and we grow and move on, and probably a cry a little (or in my case, a lot).