Disney week 8: Revealed. The Nervous Breakdown.

Again, I wrote this several weeks ago. But I'm ready to open a dialogue to discuss it now.

Finally, I admit the personal, intimate, details to my nervous breakdown.

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Tues, Nov 27, 2012

While preparing our belated Thanksgiving feast over the weekend, one of my roommates put in the movie “The Devil Wears Prada” which talks a lot about career, drive, and the sacrifices you might and maybe shouldn’t make as you work your way to the top.

The main character confides to a coworker that her personal life is hanging by a thread.
His response is “That happens when you start to do well at your job.
Call me when your entire life goes up in smoke.
That’s when it’s time for a promotion.”

That pretty much sums up my feelings and experiences this passed week and especially today.

Another example from the movies (hey, it’s okay, I work at Hollywood Studios after all!):

In every thematic drama there is a point about 2/3 the way through the movie where the main character is at a major crossroads.
You know they are either going to make a life changing decision or move, or they’re going to mess it all up and leave you yelling at the screen about what they should have done instead.
Or both.
That is where I am right now.

Anyone that knows me knows that I run on Hawaiian Time. Anyone who has been to the islands knows that things are more laid back and anyone that arrives less than five minutes late is actually early. But then we stay as long as is needed to get the job done, we do a great job, everyone loves us.

But that doesn’t work in the business world here on the mainland. And Disney doesn’t care if you’re one minute late, an hour late, or didn’t go in at all; it is all bad, goes on your permanent record and you’re done for. And even though I plan to leave like an hour early for work, those little things pile up that cause delays and suddenly you’re racing through traffic and trying to politely dash through the parking lot to clock in on time.

Add morning sickness to this and there can be no more wiggle room to getting to work on time.

...

I’d been doing so well! *frustraited sigh*

I finished work on the Spot the other day in record time! I was working with the fastest worker in our group and I had to wait on him to get some things ready because I had already completed my tasks. Several days in a row I got compliments from my manager that I had done a really good job that day.

We overcame unimaginable odds in terms of the massive amounts of production we had to accomplish each day, and worked later and later to get everything done.

While I was at work of course I was AT WORK and working my tail off. I didn’t wander away from my station or start messing with my phone, or just disappearing for maybe ten minutes at a time as some of my coworkers are known to do. I wouldn’t even stop for a drink until I had all of my production done at that point. But I still clocked in a minute or two late and more than once. And that is all that matters.

As the week came to a close, I got sick during the middle of the shift and rushed out of the room. I took care of stuff, came right back, re-washed my hands and went back to working.

Before I even said anything, my supervisor came over and said she heard I was sick, but she couldn’t send me home because I already had a report against me and I’d be fired.

Really?

I didn’t even request to go home or anything, yet I felt like I'd been hung out to dry.

Through the preceding days I would be stumbling to work feeling like I couldn’t take another step, but knowing that we were so busy I just couldn’t call in and give up on them. I’m part of the team and they need all hands on deck to make it through.

But I comforted myself that if worst came to worst, at least they’d know I tried and I wouldn’t get in trouble if they sent me home early. But now I can’t leave? Wasn’t it better that I came in and did what I could? No. I guess that is not better than nothing.

The harsh reality: one minute or one day, you are still docked.

So, this morning I got to work. Started heading in to costuming, and got really sick. Someone told me to just call in and go home. By the time I pulled myself together I knew I would be late, since there is that long walk and hundreds of people between me and that time clock. So I gave in. I called in and I went home.

And the whole way home I was like, this is crazy! I should call them and tell them what happened and ask them if I could still come in. But they would have already gotten someone to cover my shift by then, and I didn’t want to trouble them further. And I was too scared to cause more of a scene by calling and bothering them. So I went home and stayed there.

...

*deep breath*

...

I had a nervous breakdown. I could already envision the introduction of my biography: “In the Fall of 2012, Dalyn had a mental break and was admitted into a suicide watch ward.” …

While I was bent over the sink of our apartment vomiting up my meal for the day which was now streaked with blood in it, I considered going to a hospital.

Surely that would be proof enough of something or other, right? ...Then I could go home and get some help, and not just be labled a failure or a quitter, right?

When someone starts considering ways to create their cry for help, that is when things get real. Fast.

...

And it scared me.

I can’t pretend that working here isn’t a big head game. I have spent most of the week coming to grips that I just don’t have “what it takes to hack it” in this industry.

This brings my education and my career choices into question.

Do I drop out of school?
Do I quit before they fire me or something?

It’s so hard to understand everything said to me at work sometimes because I wasn’t smart enough to learn Spanish before I came out here.

I feel like I have had this amazing opportunity down here and I just blew it.

I can’t blame my failing health for it completely. An unplanned pregnancy right now is just REALLY bad timing. I wish I could just reset to my last save point before all of this started and just do it all again.

...

When following a competition reality show, there always seems to be someone who has a crisis meltdown and like walks out of the competition. I understand it now.

The competition to get into this position was so fierce. I wanted to do it so badly. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to leave my children for so long. I was afraid I wouldn’t remember everything I learned in school and bring shame. I was afraid that I would mess it all up.

But I went for it and told myself that it was precisely BECAUSE I was so scared that this would be a good experience for me. I should learn a lot about myself and regardless of how long I am able to be here, I need to make the most of every moment of it.

Well, I’ve done all of that.
The fear?
Oh yes.
I deal with all of that not day to day but just moment to moment.

Was the experience good for me?
I knew that I would regret it forever if I gave up before I even started.

But my problem is that I just don’t feel adequate enough to be here anymore, and I just don’t want to waste their time or something.

And I don’t have any witty comments or scenarios to get me through this one.
So I’m at a quandary.

My personal life does indeed feel like it’s hanging by a thread tonight.
And it looks like my entire career is about to go up in smoke.
And there is nothing I can do about it either way tonight.

So I wrote this report. I’ll submit it and go to bed. I’ll get to work early tomorrow. They’ll either send me packing or send me to a station to work. At least then the worrying will all be over and my fate will be decided for me. What more can I do tonight?

In last minute news, we switched from these “Happy Chef” logo baseball caps to the new kufi style hats. Here’s what the old logo looked like. I’ve liked it all along.

Disney week 7: Revealed. Surrendering.

This is the week that I finally admit what had been going wrong during my externship. And you may begin to understand why I was reluctant to start talking about it publicly.

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Wed, Nov 28, 2012

I think I have finally run out of things to ramble about with this experience. I continue to help wherever I am assigned to do so. If I work the spot then I portion out hundreds of cupcakes (mostly pumpkin or chocolate these days), cheesecakes, mousses, carrot cakes, chocolate cake, ganache, parfaits, and so forth. The never ending stream of pumpkin cupcakes seems unimaginable.

If I work the back end of the bakery then I make the 7 layer cookies, yellow, chocolate, or red cakes in layers or rounds. I actually got to do some marble sheet cakes the other day, which was fun. I also bake brownies, cupcakes, help divide the forcaccia dough, and I am pretty sure I have mastered the rice krispies treats. . . Do I get a merit badge for this? Because it seems like I did get one for that when I was six. :/

Regardless, I am getting better and faster at working around this high volume production bakery, and I did MUCH better dividing the cake layers into even quarters for the grapefruit cake. Of which, I finally tracked down a picture of the plated dessert itself:

[Both of these desserts were plated and photographed by a co-worker.]

And here’s one of our plated “Celebration” mousses that are given out for birthdays and such:

I have been able to work fast enough to catch a few moments at times to observe the cake decorating and cocoa butter painting of molded chocolate characters. I have decided to focus on observing what I can of their work in the last few weeks of my externship.

*long pause*

I have finally concluded that I cannot, at this time, extend my externship.

With a possible pregnancy causing me to be sick all the time, and young children who miss their mother; on top of the confirmation that I am a lousy student when it comes to on-line classes… it can only be concluded that I must return to my little growing family in Indiana for the moment.

I have resisted this at every turn because I fear that I will never have another opportunity to do this.

And it feels like I am trading in my dream as I look at my final weeks here.

*deep sigh* But that’s part of being a mother, isn’t it?

And children are worth every sacrifice.

Disney week 6: Revealed. Changing the subject.

As was previously stated, this was written several weeks ago, and I'm just about ready to talk about everything that happened. Here is what I was thinking and feeling at the time.

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Wed, Nov 14, 2012

Let’s talk about something more fun this week. Let’s talk about the one product we make that has anything to do with what I want to specialize in: The Grapefruit Cake. We make some portion of this dessert every day. We make about two dozen of the cakes every other day, which get portioned out into 8-12 slices. That’s a rather successful turnover with a $8 price point per slice.

I absolutely love working with the grapefruit because it is such a light fresh scent when I am constantly surrounded by all of these heavy sweet smells. The little notes of citrus flung wild in the bakery come to me at unexpected moments and I almost swoon every time.

I feel that my training has given me all of the skills necessary to prepare these layered cakes, and I have done well with them. Like many of the cakes featured in my Euro Cakes and Tortes class, this dessert is made as follows:

Prepare, bake, cool, wrap 10” rounds of yellow cake. Label, date, and freeze.

The cakes are leveled, sides and bottom trimmed, and split into four layers. I love filleting off the delicate layer of brown from the bottom.

Ring molds are lined with strips of acetate and placed on cake rounds. The cake rings are lined with jacond to hold the whole product together.

The cake layers are soaked with a grapefruit maceration, and slathered with layers of grapefruit jam and a cream cheese based grapefruit puree filling. The process is repeated until all layers are used, ending with a leveled layer of filling. The cakes are chilled and later finished with a thin grapefruit glaze, sliced and plated, and topped with a dried slice of candied grapefruit. It is glorious.

Here are the tips I have picked up that were not learned in school:

Instead of preparing the jacond in the traditional method with a contrasting batter that creates a unique design, they carefully thinly spread the jacond onto transfer sheets and baked, which guarantees a consistent product. They have a dedicated rotary blade device which cuts the jacond sheets into the correct sizes for lining the rings. When the jacond is trimmed to make a perfect seal around the ring, it is cut slight longer than needed, overlapping by about half - one centimeter, and then pushed into position which creates a tight lining.

The layers of fillings are spread out with a standard plastic icing smoother which has been cut in half to facilitate getting into those small spaces without giving up the benefit of having a wide blade to work with.

Like most everything else, the fillings are portioned out with specific sizes of ice-cream scoopers to get a quick consistent distribution of product.

Finally, the candied citrus slices are made by slicing the grapefruit while frozen, laying out the slices on halved silpats on small racks, dusted with powdered sugar,

and left in a dehydrator overnight instead of cooking and soaking in increasingly dense syrups.

The whole process and experience is what has made this internship useful to me and my future in this industry.

Disney week 5: Revealed. The FNG.

The following posts were written at the time, but not posted because it was all very complicated, and I wasn't ready to share with the world everything that was going on.

This was the week that I could no longer pretend that everything was going well or even mostly well.

If you go back and look at all of these posts about my Disney Externship, you will see a pattern:

Week 1, everything is wonderful and I am so excited and blessed.

Week 2, I have never been so happy to be anywhere in my life, and I never want to leave.

Week 3, okay so things have been rough, but I am thankful to be here. Maybe now that I've worked passed the blahs then things will work themselves out.

Week 4, okay, so some rotten stuff has happened to me, and it was embarassing, but I am determined to look on the bright side of things, put on a brave face, and keep going.

.... When Week 5 came along, I felt like I had failed everyone who had supported me and encouraged me, everyone who has instructed and inspired me. I felt like a let down, and I was ashamed to come clean that the can-do-push-on-through attitude was worn off and I was... well... misserable.

So, I hear you asking:

"Why talk about this now? It was months ago. No one cares anymore."

*pause*

Yeah, well be that as it may, I'm ready to work through what happened to me out there and try to find that silver lining at the end. And the best way to do that is to look back with those supposedly 20/20 hindsight goggles on. And away we go. *deep breath*

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Wed, Nov 7, 2012

This was a bad week. I have never felt more like an FNG than I have now. If you don’t know what an FNG is, I’ll just tell you that the NG stands for New Girl… It’s a term I learned from a Chef I worked with years ago.

Anyway, it seemed like all of the hard work I’ve been doing to measure everything correctly, double check stuff, and do things right, have all been replaced by getting everything wrong. Not on purpose of course, but it’s just one of those times when everything seems to go wrong.

So, what have I learned? Well, let’s talk about what happened. First of all, Florida is hot and humid. Just because we’re into late October and November doesn’t mean that things have cooled down enough that the daily mad dash I make from the back end of cast member parking, through costuming, down the back-lot, and across the park to the production bakery without arriving in a sweat. Also, there is no time to catch my breath because I am working from the moment I enter the bakery. I try to move swift and there is a great deal of bending, lifting, carrying, and basic non-stop cardio from the get go until almost the end of the shift.

In addition to sweat streaming down my face and into my eyes, my glasses steam up as I’m running around and moving in and out of freezers. So, I have taken to removing my glasses when I first get to work and not bother with them until things cool down after the lunch break. I am nearsighted, but can basically see what’s going on around me and work without incident. I just can’t read a sign on the other side of the room for example.

Besides all of that, things have progressed from me assisting someone else, to me working with someone else, to someone working with me, to me working alone with supervision, and now me just working alone. So the stage is set: I’m left unsupervised and I can’t always see clearly. I guess when you put it that way, it’s no wonder things began going wrong all the time. Okay, no more disclaimers. What happened??

Well, I was mise-ing out ingredients for both batches of the Sugar Cookie Dough and the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough while waiting for the largest mixer and its bowl to be available for use. These are huge recipes which result in one to two hundred pounds of product at a time. I was just finishing mixing together the sugar cookie dough when a coworker walked by and noticed that one of the ingredients I had measured out was incorrect. Here’s what it was:

Hmm. What is that, I hear you asking yourself. It looks like sugar maybe? But something seems a bit off. I did have that vague unease about it. But it was in the bin for the sugar and what else would it be? Well, I was supposed to measure out sugar. This is not it. Here’s a picture of granulated sugar for comparison:

Ahh, that looks more like it. Or is it salt? Hmm. These things are all starting to look alike. Let’s try a side-by-side view:

Well, as you’re probably guessing, it was discovered that I had the wrong 10lbs of stuff measured out when it was supposed to be 10lbs of sugar. The correction was not made before the first 10lbs went into the sugar cookie dough, however. Did I mention that neither Chefs nor the bakery manager were there that day? No? Well, now they both know since a call had to be made that the FNG put the wrong thing in the dough, is there a way to save it? No? Okay, throw it out and start over.

Now my shame gets to be shared not only with the whole bakery and the people that weren’t even there, but now with the Brown Derby staff and the dish tank workers since I have to wheel the entire thing over there and scoop all of the dough out of this waist high bowl into the trash can. Then, of course, I need to re-measure and mix everything for the sugar dough, and then get to portion the dough out into 8lb logs for fabrication by the morning shift. Then finally get to do it all for that chocolate chip cookie dough, and get that portioned out. Then clean up before I can go to lunch. Obviously it was all a waste of money, a waste of product, and a waste of time. I felt so ashamed.

Oh, wait. You want to know what the mistaken ingredient turned out to be, don’t you? It was granulated Fructose. . . I didn’t even know such a thing existed. I still don’t know what they use it for.

Upon closer inspection, the fructose bin isn’t even labeled. When I asked if we could label it they said no, it’s just the bin with no label. All of the other bins have large red plaques on them with clearly readable lettering. Except the sugar bin which has a tiny black label just under the lip of the bin. And apparently, the bins frequently move around so you can’t just grab the ingredients from the normal spot. Well, one thing is for sure. I haven’t made that mistake again.

And? I don’t think I can talk about the Brownie incident. Suffice it to say, I added too much water. So I had to increase the recipe to make up for it. And it resulted in 250lbs of brownie batter. That then had to be portioned out and baked and set everything back yet again. *sigh*

Disney week 4: Take courage.

My car got a new sticker. That makes me official, right? LOL

This week was a hard one because I got sick while at work and was sent home. I also missed two days. So that not only messed me up physically, but it took me a while to get my head back in the game.

Missing so much work, I had guilt for the extra work that would be placed on the others. Additional hands may have been called in to help, but that still did not ease the guilt of not completing my responsibilities.

Also, all of that meant missed opportunities to be there and learning things! Sure, it’s been a month now, and even working for Disney is not immune to the work day blahs that seem to creep up no matter what you do. But I kept reminding myself, I’m working in Disney World!!?! How can I let something like a stomach bug keep me down like this?? But, at the end of the day, Sanitation and Safety comes first, and I decided to focus on getting better so I could get back there right away.

But I still had to overcome the irrational fear of returning to work after an absence. Would they be mad at me? Will I face disciplinary action? Is my program in jeopardy here?

Being a CP (Collage Program Participant) here means that I don’t have the same lee-way as a regular part or full-time employee, and I’m supposed to be available 24/7 to fill in the gaps as needed… But part of being a professional is learning to get there and do your best regardless of how intimidating the situation may be. And isn’t the whole point of higher education and internships about learning to become a professional and work to excel in your field? So, there was some growth there, and it was not insignificant.

While I was out sick, I watched a video about behind the scenes Disney World Food which was produced by Unrapped with Marc Summers for Food Network an unknown number of years ago. While I was preparing for my job interview with Disney, I watched this and many other videos to get an idea of what I was getting myself into. Here is the video if you’re interested:



Anyway, I haven’t seen this video since April when I found out that I got the job. But I thought it would be fun to watch it again now that I’ve been here, and maybe it would all make more sense. I recognized some of the food items and locations now, and many of my roommates worked those locations as well.

When I watched this video for the first time, the only bakery mentioned was The Boardwalk Bakery here at Disney World. Since I am a Baking & Pastry student, I hoped that I would be working there. I remembered the Chef they had interviewed on location, and wanting to work with him on learning more about plated desserts.

So imagine my shock when I realized the same inspiring Chef featured in that film which made me REALLY want to have this foodservice opportunity was the same Chef working in The Production Bakery at Hollywood Studios! I have spoken with him only a few times, as the Executive Chefs are rarely around in the afternoons.

Of course I had been polite and professional and tried to show respect and a friendly disposition during our brief conversations, as I do with everyone. But now I was kind of star struck! I can’t track him down and say, “Hey, Chef! Saw you on Unwrapped last night. Big fan. I couldn’t believe that was you! Can I watch you work some time??” … Yeah, that’s not quite the best approach.

But I was encouraged to go ahead and ask about shadowing him at some point. So, after a few days of work and showing that I am a dedicated hard worker who wants to be there and is grateful for the opportunity, I finally worked up the nerve to talk to him. I said something like, “Chef, I was wondering if it would be possible for me to Shadow you sometime? I could come in on my day off and you wouldn’t even have to pay me. But I would really love to observe your technique and learn more about what you do, please.” He seemed surprised and said that I was the first person to ever ask him that. He said we could maybe work something out some time, but didn’t make any plans, so I said thank you and got back to work. So…. That’s where that is for now. I don’t know what, if anything, will come of it, but I am proud of myself for working up the nerve to talk to him.

This week has been all about overcoming fears and intimidation, being a professional, and just getting back to work. I try to show up on time, do whatever is needed, work clean, work hard, be precise but also try to move quickly, and just observe and learn whatever I can.

Sounds like good advice for any part of life, actually.