“What is this again?”

As someone with a really bad memory, sometimes it feels like all my questions are stupid. I don’t say that to be self-deprecating anything, it really is just a fact of my life. To be clear, it’s not for lack of trying. I won’t claim to have the greatest attention span, because I definitely do not, but I do always try my best to be listening attentively when people are talking to me. It’s just that if I’m given a lot of information at once, it is very much in one ear and out the other. In situations like school, I can generally make it work. Taking notes and writing things down as I hear them has proven to be very helpful for me, as reading something at my own pace can really help with my comprehension of it. However, not every situation allows for such a thing, such as work.

I work in a kitchen, and anyone who’s worked in one before knows you don’t exactly have time to be writing things down- unless you’re scribbling down a customer’s order. When I first started working there, it felt like I was asking the same questions a dozen times a day. How much of this do I need to weigh out? How long do I cook this? How small do I cut these? It made me nervous to be asking what I thought to be stupid questions, given that they’d already given me the answers- I just couldn’t seem to remember them. I didn’t want to come off as not caring or not paying attention to what they were telling me because I was genuinely trying to learn and figure out how everything worked.

I probably asked those same questions for the first month I was there, constantly pulling people away from what they were doing to get their help on something I felt I should already understand. As much as I really didn’t like my old job, Dunkin, one thing I did appreciate about it was the number of things they kept written down or, at the very least, clearly labeled. The marks on the sides of the cups for fill lines. Machines that dispense the exact amount of milk or sugar you need for each order with just a press of a button. Coffee pots that blink aggressive red lights at you when the coffee is too old to serve. I almost never had to ask because it was all right there. The hardest part of my job was finding extra lids in our maze of supplies, and even that was hardly anything. All of our shelves and boxes stayed very clearly labeled, the hard part was trying to get a 20-pound box off a 15-foot shelf all by yourself. Easier said than done, really.

Don’t get me wrong, you could not pay me enough to go back to that job. Despite their easy-to-understand order of operations, it’s actually quite a miserable place, to be honest. However, I did really appreciate not having to feel stupid asking the same thing 100 times over. Not to say that I wasn’t well trained in my new job, more so that the learning style is different. But I also understand that the kitchen I work in now isn’t really suited to that same style of labeling everything and writing things down in notebooks.

Although we have some things written down- the beat-up sign that has cook times on the side of our fryer, the checklist for the closing shift to make sure everything gets done before we leave- the rest of it is better learned through hands-on experience. While that may have been a struggle for me to begin with, I think I’ve figured it out okay. I’m quite lucky, though, that the people at my new workplace are very patient with me. I’ve gotten the hang of things, now. But there was a worry at the beginning that they would get annoyed after I asked the same question for the 5th time. Thank god, though, that most of them seem at the very least tolerant of my questions, if not understanding. Now that I’ve gotten to know the people I work with, it’s much easier to ask them questions without feeling stupid or worried that they may end up judging me for it.

“They say there is no such thing as a stupid question – I say ‘prove it!’ #askastupidquestion” by CrazyUncleJoe-MoPho is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.