On-the-job training

Several years ago I went to a summer camp reunion because during one summer several years before that, I worked as a cook under both an assistant chef and a head chef.  The assistant chef was usually someone fairly young who had been just a regular cook not too long ago.  The head chef, on the other hand, was a bit more professional.

During that summer, I got to know quite a few counselors in training, called "bridgers," because they spent a bit of time working in the kitchen.  So when I returned for the reunion I was informed that a fellow named Justin, one of the bridgers from when I was a cook, was the head chef during the reunion year.  So I went to the kitchen to pay him a visit and he recognized me right away.

Later that evening, many of us were hanging out around a bonfire and I got a chance to get caught up with Justin again.  It turns out that this was his first summer as the head chef.  Camp reunion comes every five years at the end of summer camp so he actually had to work an extra few days at the end.  Furthermore, based upon my experience, cooking for camp reunion is even more stressful than cooking for summer camp.  But the food service we were getting during the reunion seemed to indicate that Justin was handling his job as the head chef quite well.  The fact that it went this smoothly is not the sort of thing he would have expected even as recently as a year prior to this reunion summer.  A lot happened during that past year.

The head chef from the previous summer was the same guy who was head chef when I worked there.  What changed, however, was the fact that the rest of the cooks were young women who came over from Russia.  Back in my day, the demographic of the cooks was somewhat similar to that of the camp counselors; well, I was similar to the camp counselors anyway - the other cooks, perhaps not as much.  But it was a completely different scene by the time this reunion summer came around.

For one thing, the head chef got married shortly after my summer as a cook.  That marriage was over well before this reunion summer.  Apparently there was a certain newfound or rediscovered freedom that came with no longer being married because between the previous summer and this reunion summer, the head chef ran off with one of the Russian girls and was never seen nor heard from again.

Just like that, Justin got a call during the winter informing him that he had just been promoted from assistant chef to head chef - and he had never even acted as assistant chef yet!  He was already feeling unsure about how he would handle being the assistant chef, only to find himself staring down the barrel of the head chef job.  Handling the sparse crowd at the year-round outdoor center is very different from handling the huge summer camp crowd that gets served all at once during each mealtime.

In the end, Justin seemed to make out all right.  I do not know what it was like during the early part of the summer but by the end, he looked very comfortable there.  He was not called because he was qualified.  Rather, he became qualified because he was called.

John 13: 21-33, 36-38