the mixer is working now... am i?

Started my work week last Thursday night... with a broken 40 quart Hobart... some how I got through that night... but I don't remember it...

Friday night when I went in, the Hobart was still broken... the repairman hadn't shown up... I started my day by making 4 tabletop mixers full of coffeecake batter... one of our mixers had broken the night before... my list of things to do was endless... it seemed like everything was important and needed to get done... my chef wanted to leave early at 10pm to catch up with a good friend who was moving out of town... I was flat out - running around like a chicken with my head cut off... her reminders of don't forget to do this or do that, were starting to sound like scoldings, threats... then she says "You have to bake all of the tart shells." 30 minutes before that I thought I had just baked all the tart shells... I looked in the OTHER refrigerator... there were still two more trays... that is when I completely lost my shit... I had 4 other big jobs to complete, 2.5 hours to do it, and 2 fucking trays of tarts that were hiding... to make a long story short... if it was my kitchen I would have thrown the damn things across the room at my own head and called it a night... what ended up happening was that I was let off the hook on one job and told to complete two others, so that my coworkers who come in the morning "don't freak out"... what does this mean?

well... to me (the perfectionist) it means I have no choice but to complete these two jobs because someone already has to clean up after me on all the other stuff I'm dropping... it means that I miss the last train to NJ... it means I'm calling a few people I know at midnight to see where I can crash, and contemplating what it would be like to ride the PATH or subway all night long... it means when I finally leave at 2:30am after getting those two jobs done and cleaning up the kitchen I'm fucking fuming...

it means I have to give myself a damn break... so after stewing about it Friday night, talking to my friend Danielle, Sean and family about it... I need to put this whole "job" in perspective... as my chef so kindly pointed out the next day... "it's only food" and "never, never miss your train for this job"... I'd like to do everything perfect the first time, I'd like to work really fast, I'd like to know all the shortcuts, I'd like to be able to look at a list of things to do and quickly calculate in my head the most efficient order in which to complete them... but if I knew all those things, would I have needed to go to culinary school? wouldn't I be an executive pastry chef right now instead of a shit eating extern? Yeah... I just needed some perspective... it's too bad that it takes a catastrophic event for me to figure it out... Can I ever do things the easy way?