Friday 16 November 2007

The Corporate Catering game

Working in the catering industry is almost as much fun as working in the pub game. In the pub we dealt with drunks, hooligans and your common d!%#head, in catering its your ignorant or arrogant personal assistant who doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to know. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against them. They’re only doing what the boss demands from them.

Try these on for size:
1. At 9.42am a certain government office in the city rings us up to ask if we can cater for 100 people for morning tea to be delivered at 10am. That morning! It takes 15 minutes just to drive to their end of town!
2. All cakes and quiches, etc are delivered cut into an even number of slices (for obvious reasons). Try telling a PA that 13 is not an even number when her boss has told her to cater for 13 people!
3. Chicken is not vegetarian! Neither is tuna!
4. If you email us at 9pm the night before, you will not get your 7am breakfast delivered to you.
5. If we don’t call you to confirm your order, it probably means we never actually received it in the first place!
6. Yes, we are based in the Melbourne CBD and no, we cannot deliver to Sydney, Brisbane, Perth or Geelong for that matter. (Well, we could, but considering the charge to Dandenong – 35km away – is $80, beware of the delivery fee to Sydney!)
7. No, we can’t deliver 1 sandwich and a cup of coffee to your office. Not even for a delivery fee!

Oh the joys! And then people wonder why I look forward to the weekend so much!

Chat soon,
DelBoy

6 comments:

6000 said...

With all those silly rules and regulations, it's incredible you get any business at all! ;@)

Can't you find a decent supplier of quality vegetarian chicken? And 18 minutes warning for morning tea to an office 15 minutes away still leaves you 3 minutes for prep, loading and unloading. What's wrong with you, man?!?!

P.S. I could do with a sandwich - what would it cost for a courier to Cape Town? Wrap it well - it'll be in customs for 3 months...


P.P.S. Alex has slept through since 7 months. We have to wake him each morning. Seriously.

The Divine Miss M said...

hahah - those people sound as absurd as some of my work colleagues ;)

Good luck delboy!!

Izzy said...

haha!! I've been dealing with people like that for 4 years!!!
U can understand my pain now!!!

xoxo

kyknoord said...

"But that's what I'm paying you for!" - the universal lament of optimistic fools who seem to believe that with money, all things are possible. People are people, no matter what industry you work in.

DelBoy said...

6000: $6.30 for the sandwich and $7500 for my first class ticket to Cape Town via Hong Kong. When do you want it by?
miss m & isi: The make our lives interesting at least! Else what would we blog about? BTW, do yo know each other? You both work at the Beeb...
kyk :Or how about "How much discount can I get on that? We spend soooo much money on catering!" Even a bank asked us for 35% discount the other day!! Like that was EVER gonna happen!

6000 said...

You have 18 minutes.