We all have bad nights. Especially in the hospitality business. The same goes for the emergency care business.
A trauma nurse often sees people at their worst. When they are angry. Hurt. Disappointed. Vulnerable. A global CEO and a local bully are the same; be treated equally and receive a “triage” based on the severity of their injuries, without any factor being greater. The fact is, nowadays people don’t go to the ER to show their skills to people. They go out of acute need. Bread. Something they need to fix. The triage nurse must prioritize them in such a way that the trauma team can lift as many as possible out of impending death.
Sharing some similarities, people don’t go to restaurants because they need to fill their stomachs with a block of grime to get through the night. At least not fancy food establishments (like the one who dismissed my childhood crush with callous and perhaps even unconscious indifference). We go to restaurants to restore ourselves, to replenish ourselves, perhaps even to ‘cure’ our emotional and psychological meals of the day. Also in a restaurant there should be a triage nurse and a trauma team.
The word “Restaurant” is derived from a Latin word, like French, for “restore.” It entered the language about 300-400 years ago. The idea at the time, when the first restaurant in France was opened, was for the service to be restorative; not just feeding people (especially not through a 60 second window with NASCAR like speed and the indifference of the turnstile).
A restaurant hostess is like a sorting nurse in a way. The waiters, the chef, and a host of other supporting characters are, in a way, the trauma team. However, as it stands now, the restaurant hostess has no binding moral or ethical oath to abide like a hospital’s trauma and triage teams. A triage nurse is trained and is committed to prioritizing based on needs. Today, a host / hostess, at best, prioritizes based on bribery, favoritism, and nepotism.
Imagine being that poor pitiful soul who ends up in front of a triage nurse when you’ve had a bad day (while, potentially, you’ve had the worst day of your life).
Tonight, the trauma team I held most dear in South Florida left me bleeding on the streets. I drove an hour and twenty minutes for his treatment. I’d had it before and knew it to make it the best. However, the triage nurse had a bad day and pushed me to the corner to bleed to death, more concerned for her own emotional well-being than the corpses piling up outside her door. The trauma team kept their noses in a pot filled with blisters of immediate needs.
In this example, the triage nurse was the wife of one of the best chefs in Florida. She happens to be the hostess of her increasingly popular restaurant. Shely admitted that she is not ready for the success they are enjoying and often freezes in unlockable stress buckets.
It’s about time those in the restaurant profession see their jobs as more than paths to fame, fortune, and the holy grail of “celebrity chef” status. Imagine if every triage nurse and trauma team tactfully drew from their posts only the fame and fortune they could afford and got proportionally less satisfaction in curing, curing, saving and saving lives.
Today, we sell fully loaded hamburgers in motorized feeders / windows with the speed and technology of a prestigious national toll booth. We have mechanized service speed at the cost of service. We have lost the original notion of the catering business. We have confused efficiency with effectiveness.
Our role in this business is not to put people on a tourniquet like cattle. Yes, you can make a profit on that among consumers of commodities. However, the true genesis of this profession was to heal and restore.
