{"id":24470,"date":"2018-12-20T14:27:00","date_gmt":"2018-12-20T13:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peregrinusmundi.com\/dans-les-bras-de-hiver\/"},"modified":"2020-07-05T17:28:03","modified_gmt":"2020-07-05T15:28:03","slug":"in-the-arms-of-winter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peregrinusmundi.com\/en\/in-the-arms-of-winter\/","title":{"rendered":"In the arms of winter"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Mid-November, the good weather ended up disappearing and a wave of bad weather hit us for almost two weeks. The change was brutal and my morale struggled to endure the change. After a month in the sun, a month of beauty and of vacation feeling, it was over. The pretty village of Chamonix was tinged with gray and the streets emptied, surveyed only by a few diehard tourists.<\/p>

Added to this was an increase in the workload in the restaurant and a certain difficulty in accommodating certain members of the team. While work during the month of October seemed relatively easy to me, November revealed the many management problems that Le Vista (the restaurant in the Alpina where I work) faces. The team is understaffed and is mostly inexperienced. The vast majority of the staff (like me, for that matter) do not come from hotel and tourism schools and have learned work on the field. In an organized and established restaurant, with a somewhat stable team, having a few staff members without much experience does not pose many problems. But in Le Vista, due to the complexity of the organisation, this turns out to be a big obstacle to the good management of the restaurant.<\/p>

The vast majority of the staff is very young, in their twenties. They are young, stupid as we are all more or less at that age and are especially interested in what happens outside of work (parties and flirting). Between those who arrive with a hangover, those who are late, those who are sick and those who do not come at all, I begin to realize that if I want the job to be done, and done well, I am going to have to do it myself. So I work hard and my overtime triples in the space of a few weeks. I feel like I am spending my life in the restaurant.<\/p>

The restaurant itself is poorly designed. It is very beautiful, completely renovated, like the hotel a few years ago, and is located on the seventh floor of the hotel. It has a huge bay window and the view of Mont-Blanc is superb. With its pretty colorful seats, its wooden decor and its bar in a circle in the middle, the place is impressive. The restaurant can accommodate more than 300 people and we alternate between \u00e0 la carte service and buffets (during seminars). But the renovation is still not finished (many details not finished are visible) or has never been finished. And above all, the place was absolutely not thought to be functional. It is beautiful but impracticable. The kitchens and the back room have not been redone and are very old and poorly appointed. The place is so large that it takes infinite time to move between tables, access the kitchen or bring the dishes from the kitchen to the customer’s table. And last but not least, very few spaces in the restaurant itself have been designed to be store the material (glasses, plates, cutlery, menus, etc.). The vast majority of the equipment is therefore in the back room, making service slow and inefficient.<\/p>

My orchid has lost all of its flowers. I feel like it is a reflection of myself. The weeks of November are long and tiring and I slowly feel drained of my energy without managing to recover. Life in Beaulieu, where the staff is housed, is noisy and I have a little trouble sleeping at night. Tired, I left a few words and remarks of certain members of the team touch me and certain crazy situations (always to be pushed to do more with few means) made their way in my heart. A slight feeling of depression hangs over me. With the bad weather I was not able to resume hiking and the arrival of winter is erasing the possibility of walking in the wild. I kind of feel like I am in a cage.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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