You get exposure to the work of kitchen assistants, accountants, general managers, food safety and sanitation staff, and other nutritionists, so you can learn in many different areas. It really is a place where you can hone your skills.
＊Interview
At the beginning of the interview, the supervisor did not clearly explain what duties I would be responsible for, but emphasized that they had a relevant academic background and would value the professional expertise of nutritionists. They said we would not be asked to do things that were outside our responsibilities, helping in the kitchen would not be a regular occurrence, and we would work and be paid during winter and summer vacations. The nutritionist position was described as a position of responsibility, meaning we could leave once our work was finished—ha ha.
＊Unclear duties
After joining, I mainly helped with other people’s work (for example, helping the accountant reconcile accounts from several months earlier, helping the nutritionist at an outside location check order forms, doing graphic design for central-kitchen menus, and being ordered by the company to come up with designs for a new lunchbox, among other things). In fact, it took nearly a month of helping out before I got to do work that resembled a nutritionist’s duties. No one specifically explained what my future responsibilities would be, so I mistakenly thought I would be a full-time nutritionist, like the senior colleague in that company who handled school-related business.
＊Work and overtime
After two months, my duties became more nutritionist-like, but I was still called into the kitchen at least three days a week to work as a kitchen assistant for one to two hours. The kitchen workers did not see this as helping out at all; they thought that whenever they were short-staffed, people from the office should come in and work! Since I could not finish my own work, I had no choice but to stay after the scheduled 17:00 end of the workday to finish it—oh, and because we were on a position-of-responsibility system, there was no such thing as overtime pay~ (Although I later told the supervisor that I hoped overtime pay could be provided, the response was that they would handle it and discuss it later. Another colleague was told by the supervisor that overtime pay was $120 per hour, but in reality—ha ha, I will not even mention how I was forced to take unpaid leave during winter vacation while still having to complete three weeks’ worth of menus, without receiving the compensation I was entitled to.)
＊Lunch break
The scheduled working hours were 8:00–17:00. The employee handbook stated that the daily working hours were nine hours, with no designated lunch break. We still had to answer the phone while eating lunch. The warehouse staff took their break at that time, so if a supplier delivered goods, we had to help check the inventory.
＊Frequency of problems
Even after repeatedly confirming the ingredient quantities set on completed menus, there were always problems on the chef’s end (without exaggeration, the chefs called every day to report issues). But this helpless young woman was unable to resolve the long-standing Rashomon-like problems among purchasing, warehouse management, and suppliers that had existed since before I joined the company.
＊Teamwork
It is a small company, but it is quite something: there are many factions—kitchen vs. office, central kitchen vs. institutional catering, old-timers vs. newcomers. Whenever something happened in the central kitchen, everyone in the office was mobilized. When it came to institutional catering, the warehouse staff and nutritionists had to figure things out themselves. Oh, and regarding account entry, the general manager kept muttering that the institutional-catering accounts were something the nutritionists themselves were supposed to key in, right?! But the central-kitchen nutritionists did not have to do it~
＊Priority and favoritism
I am a nutritionist myself, yet every Friday I had to help the nutritionist at an outside location check order forms. I did not understand why the supervisor did not require that nutritionist to prepare the purchasing quantities for her own menus, check them carefully, and then submit them. Instead, she had other people with their own duties spend an entire day helping her verify them. This had originally been the food safety and sanitation staff’s job, but after I joined, it became the responsibility of me and another new nutritionist.
Whenever the central-kitchen nutritionist prepared dishes that required sauce to be ladled into cups, it gradually became something that the other new nutritionist and I had to stop our own work to do. People in the office reported to the supervisor that we were not very proactive about being the first to go into the kitchen to help (I really did not understand why the nutritionists responsible for the central kitchen rarely needed to go in, while we newcomers did), so the cup-ladling work naturally became our responsibility.
＊Supervisor
The matters discussed during the interview were all very vague, such as salary, scope of work, and the position-of-responsibility system. At the time, they said that the salary of X was offered in the hope that I would stay until the following year, but when I resigned, they said, “Wasn’t it agreed from the beginning that this salary was for working a full year?” (There was no contract of any kind.) If you do not explicitly object to something, they will assume that you accept it.
They said clocking in and out was merely for administrative staff so that the Labor Insurance Bureau could inspect the records, and that we could leave once our work was finished. However, people there frequently worked overtime~ (At first, other administrative staff even told me that I could not leave too punctually because the supervisor would notice.) The rules written in the employee handbook were not considered as effective as what the supervisor said verbally. For example, taking sick leave meant having a full day’s pay deducted, but they would not deduct your perfect-attendance record—isn’t that nice? Except there was no perfect-attendance bonus in the first place~ And where was the position-of-responsibility system they talked about? Regardless of how long administrative staff had worked there, they were required to give one month’s notice when resigning. They only allowed me to leave after 15 days because they could see how unhappy I was. A few days before I left, they even told another nutritionist what was wrong with me and lectured me in a particularly targeted way about certain matters—none of this had happened before I submitted my resignation~
＊Benefits
There was no such thing as a bonus, let alone gifts or bonuses for the three major holidays. I heard the year-end bonus was only 0.4 months’ salary, and participation in the annual banquet raffle was restricted to employees who had worked there for at least six months.
(Personally, I was very dissatisfied that there was no direct route to the restroom from inside the company. Whenever it was windy or raining, we had to brave the weather to use the restroom. The company did not have any ceiling fans, and even when it was hot, we had to ask a superior for permission to turn on the air conditioning. The supervisor himself loved smoking. Although he did not smoke indoors, the smell drifted into the office through gaps in the building, and thirdhand smoke lingered for a long time before dissipating.)