Now that I've had plenty of time to reflect on my management week, it really wasn't all that bad.
Monday began as a disaster.
Our steward for the week was told by Chef to throw out all of the product that was outdated. (Should have been done the Friday before, but it was only the second week of class)
We had made some sauces the previous week and had frozen them. They were taken out Saturday night to thaw for Monday's use. The steward didn't realize that, and the sauces had not been relabeled with the defrost date, so the product was thrown out.
The whole idea of having those sauces in the freezer was to defrost them as needed, in order to save time. Instead, we had to remake all of the sauces, on top of doing two days' prep work.
The other back of the house manager was the production manager. She and I would stop by Chipotle (a burrito chain) for dinner after class. We got our burritos, and went straight to my house to eat them and begin work on our production sheets for the next day. The previous evening, we were up until 4AM on the phone, trying to complete them. We decided it was best if we did them in person.
We averaged four hours of sleep each day of our management week, as production sheets took forever. We did them by hand, and were too meticulous about the exact amount of food we needed to produce the next day. Lesson learned.
The Friday of our management week, during clean up, Chef called us into his office to have a meeting with the next week's back of the house managers. While we were there, the kitchen staff was really lazy for some reason, and did a horrible job cleaning up, and left early. Chef got upset with us, so we had to finish cleaning up.
Afterwards, some of our classmates who had helped us were standing with us in the locker room, and the production manager and I just broke into tears. It was actually pretty comical, but we were so tired. The other girls were yet-to-be managers had these horrified looks on their faces like, oh my goodness, what am I in for?
All in all, our week went really smoothly. We were just so exhausted from our week by the time it was over.
I have to say though, I feel more confident as a manager, and my management skills have definitely improved since then.
