Critical incident report: Making dinner

What?

During a Friday Fun event at the Boys and Girls Club, two volunteers and I were set to make dinner. We ran into some roadblocks that made it difficult to accomplish this task. When we arrived, we were told the time had change and now we only had 20 minutes to make dinner. In the kitchen, there was some miscommunication with a staff member. At first, she said there was about 100 students there, but we asked another staff person who said there was only 60.

We were asked to wear gloves, but there were none in the kitchen. Instead, we planned to wash our hands well. The staff person said that she would go get gloves. Instead of returning with enough gloves for everyone, the staff person only brought one set of gloves for her to use. We resorted to using plastic bags as gloves to serve the food.

So what?

I tried to be a team player with all the issues, but it was super hard to keep my emotions in check while all the things were going wrong. I was mad at the situation, because normally the club employees are not in the kitchen with us, so it threw us off to have another person in the kitchen. Unfortunately, to me, it felt like nothing we could do was good enough.

It would have been nice if we had been informed beforehand that we were going to start serving dinner at 4 p.m., and there would be an employee in the kitchen to help us.I was also frustrated that we didn’t have the proper equipment to serve the food.

Now what?

It would be helpful to have a conversation with the staff at the Boys and Girls Club so that we

have a similar understanding of expectations. If that means we buy gloves to bring with us or we show

up a little earlier, it would be better to know that now before we experience those frustrations again.