So I work at the Olive Garden.
Some people love it, some people hate it, for food reasons. I just kind of hate it, for work reasons. It takes up too much of my time...although I am sure I would only be watching T.V. or laying around doing nothing (both better options than waiting on people for 7 hour shifts, burning myself on hot plates and scraping off people's dirty dishes, and coming home smelling of garlic breadsticks or other pungent odors).
But yesterday a new annoyance came up while I was at work, doing all of the above annoying things. The managers decided to start a friendly competition of which employee can sell the most desserts; they just needed more desserts sold for their own benefit so they tricked everyone by offering a Best Buy gift card for whoever sells the most. I don't care about selling desserts or a Best Buy gift card so I wasn't fooled. (FYI, I made it three rounds deep) But it must be because of my natural selling abilities and the fact that I just like beating other employees.
Anyways, as I am walking toward the bracket to see who is in the Final Four (oh yes, a little mini March Madness dessert bracket), I see a huge sign that reads: FINAL FOUR, ONLY TWO WEEKS LEFT IN THE COMPITITION!
Um, what? The E and the I aren't even next to each other on the keyboard, so don't even try to play it off as a typo.
One of my managers, a person who runs the entire Olive Garden restaurant, spelled competition like this: COMPITITION. Disregarding the fact that you can't spell the word, um, hello, can you not use spell check before you put up a document for the entire place to see? Apparently they were so sure of their spelling expertise that spellcheck was below them. The other thing that got me was that not one other person noticed the error. Even after I pointed it out, still no one thought it was a big deal.
Moral of the story: I guess I must care a lot about correct spelling, thanks to, ahem, being a journalist, and now, an editor. But also, a whole lot of people either don't know how to spell, or just don't see the importance of it. Such a shame, because one letter changed how I now view my managers.
Radio
15 years ago
5 comments:
I'm loving the friendly Final Four compITITION your bosses set up for you, too funny! Yet I do see where you are coming from.
I often receive emails from either people in group projects or friends and I find typos all the time! Blame it on the keyboard, blame it on spell check, I don't care, just fix it!
I can't wait to go to Olive Garden again and see if you will be playing in the National Championship!
If I go, I'll order dessert (not desert) in your name. But are you worried that your boss might see the post, that a national Olive Garden search of terms will reveal your loathing of misspelling?
I am leaving a comment on your blog because I just saw you leave a comment on mine. Your story made me laugh. I too cannot stand seeing mispellings. I don't even like bad grammar in rock n roll songs. We've all turned crazy.
I think this must be a restaurant thing. I work at a BBQ restaurant at home, and along with smelling like smoke, gumbo, and an assortment of nasty food, I also notice spelling and grammar errors with our work documents. I was assigned the job of filling all the menus this past summer and noticed over 15 spelling and grammar errors. What's disappointing is it was actually someone's job to check the menus before printing them. After pointing this out to my boss our restaurant received a huge refund, don't worry the person who proofed it didn't get fired, but they were redone immediately so we didn't look bad.
To follow up on Stephanie's comment, I see mistakes on menus all the time. I can't believe that a restaurant would not have taken extra measures to ensure that the menu was error-free.
Yes, the selling point of any restaurant is the food, but typos and misspellings on a menu may reflect other shortcomings or failures to pay attention to detail.
With any professional endeavor, from menus to newspapers, I expect the professional entity to put forth their best product. Sure, a restaurant manager isn't a copy editor, but that doesn't excuse him or her to be lazy and not proofread.
I also wanted to share a little spelling trick my mom taught me: Dessert has two S's because you always want seconds.
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