More Initiative Games

The day after this incident occurred, we received a phone call at the kitchen. The conversation went something like this:

Caller: Do you ever do team building activities?

Me: Well, we just had one yesterday.
Me (what I'm thinking): We just had our first one ever yesterday.

Caller: Wow, great! What do you typically do for those activities?

Me: Yesterday the group who came had their own facilitator. They formed two different teams and had different obstacles to overcome as they assembled each entree. The obstacles were things like only one team member could see the recipe, and they had to communicate the instructions to the rest of their team using charades. Others involved making their entrees blindfolded or with the groups hands tied together.
Me (what I'm thinking): Typically?!? All we did yesterday was set up the stations and let the professional run the show.

Caller: Oh, that's perfect - much better than the ideas I had. Can I bring 5 of my employees to your kitchen next week and have you facilitate the activities?

Me: Let me check our schedule.
Me (what I'm thinking): Did I just rejoin Residence Life?

Next Friday we are hosting this group and I'm facilitating the games. I though I had left organizing group games behind after leaving both my job as an RA and my various youth and family ministry jobs. It's interesting that the part of my former career that I always felt was one of the most superficial things I did (leading group games) is now turning up in my new food career.

Initiative Games

I spent one year in college as an Resident Assistant. The picture that most people have of an RA (living in a single on a long hall in a dorm room, holding social events for residents, building "team spirit," enforcing anti-alcohol rules, resolving roommate disputes, etc.) is not at all what my job involved. I was one of three RA's in an off-campus apartment building in which CMU leased rooms. Our apartments were interspersed among other residents, from other students to senior citizens.

Most of my residents were upperclassmen who wanted to get away from the typical dorm experience. They did not want to attend social events, they had more privacy in their apartments than a resident of a dorm would have, and they chose their roommates.

All of us RA's for the various off-campus apartments were a bit of a breed apart. We had a different approach to the cheerleading, rah-rah style that typified Residence Life. But one of the biggest differences was our attitude towards "team-building" or "initiative" games.

We hated them.

Whether it was RA training, or Freshmen orientation, or just a normal staff meeting, ResLife could not seem to do anything doing some kind relay race or a trust fall or untying a human knot. Now, I understand that those games have some value the first dozen or so times one plays them, but I had more than my share of those before finishing high school. The off-campus apartment RA's never made our residents play a game to help them bond with each other.

So it was amusing to see a group come into the kitchen today and do some of those same team-building games, and enjoy them.

We got a phone call at about 1:00 from the president of TeamSynergy, a consulting company that does team building events for businesses. They had planned to bring the staff of a local church to one of our competitors for a cooking event, but they just found out that the other kitchen did not have enough food (I don't know how you schedule an event and first, don't order the food to be able to hold the event, and second, why they could not walk across their parking lot to buy what they lacked at the grocery store) He was wondering if there was any way they we could host their event 30 minutes later.

"Of course," the owner said. So we did. It was a little bit like our own team-building game to try to prepare for this event with only 30 minutes notice.

The timing was actually good for us, as we had finished most of our major prep work for week and the kitchen was well stocked. Because it was our major prep day, the owner and I had two other employees in the kitchen to help us clean and set-up three stations for the groups to use making their entrees. We used every bit of those 30 minutes to get ready, but it did all come together. The biggest problem with this impromptu event was that I didn't get a chance to have lunch until around 4pm.

So there I was, being reminded of my days as an RA, watching team building games being combined with cooking. In one team, only one person was allowed to read the recipe and she had to use charades to communicate to the rest of the group how to make the entree. In another, the four team member had to tie their arms and hands together before starting to work on their entree. There were blindfolds, that old initiative game standby, involved in another group.

It sure seemed like these ladies had never played these kinds of games before. They fell into all of the usual traps (the quiet member had the right answer but was ignored, impatience led the group to overlook the simple directions, one person on the team would just start out on their own without regard to the rest of the team, etc.) but sure had fun doing it! The day was a good reminder to me that these things have value, even if they seem old and tired to me.

97% Safe

I received the results from my ServSafe certification class I took a couple of weeks ago. It's not a terribly impressive result. Anyone who graduated from High School ought to be able to pass this. There were important things on the test, things that anyone working with food needs to have memorized - such as the optimal conditions for bacterial growth and minimum recommended cooking temperature for various foods. There were also things on the test that I really don't think I need to have memorized.

I don't need to know off the top of my head whether a shellfish poisoning likely came from saxitoxin, brevetoxin, or domoic acid, particularly if I know that I can find out within a minute or two. Our short term memory has a limited capacity, and it takes work to move info from short term to long term memory.

One of the ways that the world has changed recently is that the value of being able to find information has increased. With so much information available on the web, knowing how to find the exact piece of information you need is critical. And while the "information superhighway" has put a vast amount of information at our fingertips, but it has also placed an equally (if not greater) amount of junk at our disposal as well. Knowing how to use a google search (or when google is not the right tool to use to find the info you need) is a skill that has real value.

I think I sometimes take this for granted, but then someone will ask me how to find a particular website. I don't usually bother to memorize an exact url, so I can't give them the answer that they think they need. I would just search for it, but usually the person with the question has already tried that. Various tips about how to use google help somewhat, but they assume you know which words to use. All the Boolean operators in the world won't help if the words you use are vague or you don't use enough words.

I imagine web search optimization (for the people doing the searches, not for people trying to drive traffic to their website) will become a standard part of school curriculum. I remember being in elementary school and learning how to use the card catalog and to understand the Dewey decimal system in a library. Learning how to use to a search engine, and then how to evaluate the results of your search, are just as important now.

I Got Mad Skillz, Yo!

Thursday is going to be a busy day at work. We are catering a lunch for 90 people at a financial company where we plan to start a business delivery program. It's a bit intimidating as we have never catered anything this big before. In addition to the lunch, tomorrow night we will host an open house for the 5th grade class at local elementary school (the school that I attended as a whippersnapper) This will kickoff a fundraiser we are doing with the school.

It felt like we racing all day to prep for tomorrow while also doing all of the regular work that comes along on a Wednesday. I spent the first hour and a half of the day mincing herbs and chopping green onions. Last November, when I started this job, it would have taken me twice as long (and my arm and wrist would have been quite sore) to do all of that chopping. I had not noticed along the way that my knife skills had improved as much as they have. Now, I'm certainly not as fast as I would need to be if I worked in a busy kitchen for a nice restaurant, but it's nice to see progress!

A job that facilitates blogging

It turns out my current job is great for facilitating blogging. While I enjoy my job, and parts of it are intellectually stimulating, there are quite mundane aspects to it as well. There are always dishes to wash, 10 cups of basil to mince, or any number of other tasks that don't require much thought. When I'm doing those things, I write incredibly insightful blog posts in my mind.

The only problem is that when I get home at the end of the day and sit down to type them out, I never am quite able to capture the brilliance and eloquence that I know I had earlier in the day. A friend of mine is looking for a device she can hook up to her brain that would enable her to download to her blog the thoughts she has as she is falling asleep. Suzanne, when you find something like that, I want to get one to bring with me to work!

I'm not a morning person

When I'm on vacation, and have no particular schedule to keep, I tend to go to bed around 2-3am and wake up between 10-11. Some people need a cup of coffee before they really wake, I need a shower before I can think straight. However, there are a few times when I love the morning.

The summer after I graduated from high school, I worked for a restaurant as a stock boy/bus boy. Only the chef would arrive at the restaurant before I did. He would give me a list of all the produce, meats and dry goods that the various cooks needed that day, and I would go to the stock room in the basement and start the process of bringing everything up to the kitchen.

Most of the time, a professional kitchen is full of noise, stress and chaos. There was something magical about being there when it was silent, and then watch thing slowly come to life. Various people would trickle in; the sous chef, other line cooks, the pastry chef. The quiet would turn to a whirlwind while the simple raw ingredients I brought upstairs would be transfigured into a tiramisu or a spicy seafood marinara.

While the kitchen where I currently work does not have the same kind of frenzy one would find in a restaurant's kitchen, I still love the mornings there. It starts quiet and still. I love turning on the light and walking into the cooler. Seeing the herbs and cheeses and pork loins sitting on the shelves, while knowing that later that day someone out there will sit down with their family and enjoy those same ingredients in a great meal, is incredibly satisfying. It's a great way to start the day, even for someone who is not a morning person.

Photos from a visit to The City Market in Kansas City last fall.

Ambition

I've never been a particularly ambitious fellow. I decided upon my college major at the latest possible moment, the end of my sophomore year. My choice, Literary & Cultural Studies, was greatly influenced by the relatively thin list of required classes for LCS. This allowed me to take more classes in other fields, like history and philosophy. (I didn't want to get tied into any one thing)

I did not seek out either of the first two jobs I had after graduation, I was recruited in both instances. There was a time while I lived in Washington state, after I left my youth ministry position at the town's Lutheran church, when I floated between a number of different things, never really developing a plan for my future. I took a couple of seminary classes, I did a bit of work as a personal chef, I contemplated being a full time house-husband. Once again, I ended up falling into something. The church I was attending was seeking a Director of Family Ministry, and I talked with the pastor about helping out on an interim basis while their search continued. She persuaded me to meet with their search committee, and I ended up on staff there. It was the best ministry job I've ever had, but it was not at all the result of any ambition on my part.

Last summer, when I started thinking about life after a divorce, I had a hard time picturing what I should do. It was kind of tough to think about being the Director of Family Ministry at a church when my own family just fell apart. The church graciously communicated to me that they would support me if I wanted to stay on staff, but I just did not think that I had the emotional or spiritual reserves to be effective in that position.

I have always loved to cook; some of my favorite memories from growing up were spending a Saturday afternoon making chili or goulash with my dad while watching college football on TV. Everyone in my family is a good cook and my sister, Monte, is a baker who currently works (at least until my new niece or nephew is born in the next couple of weeks!) in the test kitchen at King Arthur Flour. She and I have dreamed over the years about running a bed & breakfast or a bakery/cafe together in our retirement. It never seemed like it could happen any sooner than that because my ex has an incredible job in Washington that we would not leave, and Monte and her husband intend to settle down in the Midwest.

Since I am no longer tied to the Pacific Northwest, I decided to actually do something about that dream (which is now focused more on the bakery cafe idea than on the B&B) Could this be the beginnings of some ambition appearing in my life?

For the past three months I have been the assistant manager at a new fresh-take-&-bake kitchen in Kansas City. We make meals that people can pick up on their way home from work and cook for dinner that night. I get to do a lot of the cooking, help with the marketing, help with the training of the employees, and brainstorm strategies for growing the business with the owner. I also observed (and helped with a little bit) part of the process of opening a new business. The owner has been wonderful to work for, and he has been intentional about saying things like "such-and-such is something you will need to keep in mind when you and your sister open your cafe." I have a hard time imaging a better place for me right now to learn the things I will need to know to make the dream of running a cafe a reality.