1991 - My New Job in Houston

I settled in Houston. I was going to be happy here. I loved this quaint little bakery I was going to manage, and the concept was much more my style. People came for coffee in the morning, and busy social lunches, and many of my customers reminded me of my mom. I could relate. Funny though, they all thought I was some high school girl. They did not see this very important manager under the chef jacket we wore as managers. I would run into people from high school or college, so proud to sport my manager outfit, and I could see that they did not grasp my importance. It took a while for me to grasp that my importance was really under-rated. I was hired to open a new high volume location in Houston's booming Rice Village. This was a true adventure. We did not have a clue about opening a new restaurant, and even my boss was new at this. We hired a staff, ordered some food, got the beautiful establishment ready to open, and we were totally blown away! We had about twice as many customers than we expected, and about half as many employees as we needed. We were out of food by noon on the first day, and we started to consider adding hot dogs to our very sophisticated French cuisine. It was total chaos.

I had teammates though, and that was important. We bonded in this delirious state we were in. We were grateful for 3 hours of sleep. The more I worked, the more I thought I was even more important -- still earning $24.5K. I had a great co-worker friend who ended up a bridesmaid in my wedding. She and I would go for drinks at the end of the chaos, then home for 3 hours sleep, and back for the challenge again.

We were not so crazy about our boss. He was not so much into the physical part of this operation, but he seemed to fancy charts and graphs. This was before the introduction of Windows so creating charts and graphs of our staffing schedules on 3 hours sleep seemed like torture. I didn't really see how this was a priority, in the scheme of keeping this establishment a float. We called him "Lurch" (like the guy on the Munsters). He was so serious and kind of a nerd, and we were sooooo... cool and fun.