After working in a burger restaurant for 1 year, I wanted to try to gain experience in other fields. Then I tried to find work around the Causeway Bay area by going to one shop or restaurant.

Worked in a famous pizza shop in Hong Kong as a chef

After several failures in applying for a job, I tried to apply at a pizza delivery shop that is still located across from Saint Paul's Hospital. My job was as one of the chefs to make pizza for a salary of HK$23 per hour. For me, it was quite a difficult thing because I had never worked in the kitchen at all.

Unlike the burger restaurant where I worked before, all the ingredients were prepared, and all that remained was to arrange and heat them. But at the pizza shop they had a more complicated way of making it, so I worked for a short time and then tried to find another job.

Co-workers are also unfriendly and easily emotional, perhaps due to ordering too much and not having enough manpower.

Move to a well-known convenience store in Hong Kong as a cashier and stacked things in the fridge

I then looked for another job and applied for a branch of a well-known convenience store in Hong Kong which is now located opposite the Indonesian Consulate General in Hong Kong. Then I was hired at a salary of HK$20 per hour. At that time, only 2 people were working in the store: me and the store manager. In the afternoon, after I finished work, there was a night employee who replaced me. I was given the task of being a cashier, but most of the time I was in the fridge sorting drinks from the back, and it usually took hours to complete the task.

The store manager was kind and patiently taught me the things I needed to know. For me, the most difficult thing is memorizing all types of cigarettes sold in stores because my family, other than my grandfather, does not smoke in Indonesia.

The work in this store was not very tiring, but having to go in and out of the refrigerator in the middle of summer made my body weaker and caused me to lose concentration during night school lessons. So I decided to look for another job after I worked for almost 1 month at this store.

Finding a suitable job at a Western restaurant in the Tin Hau area

After some searching, I found a small Western restaurant in the Tin Hau area right between Lau Li Street and Ngan Mok Street. The restaurant company had more than 40 branches in Hong Kong in the 1990s, but shortly after I resigned from the restaurant, the owner went bankrupt, and all the restaurants closed.

The restaurant has 3 chefs, 2 waiters, 1 beverage specialist, 1 manager, and 1 assistant manager who are on duty at the same time. I was given a salary of HK$25 per hour at that time, and my main job was as a restaurant waitress, but sometimes I also had to help make drinks if the employees who specialize in making drinks were on vacation. From there, I learned how to make Hong Kong-style Milk Tea. Sometimes I also had to go into the kitchen to help make desserts and wash the dishes.

Learn to deal with visitors who have different characters

Unlike burger restaurants, Western restaurants require more attention and service for guests, especially since the guests are Hong Kong locals who are known for their complaining culture.

Dealing with guests who complain on absurd grounds is common to us, and not a few of them are educated people. An example is a well-known novelist in Hong Kong who was visiting our restaurant at the time, and he complained that the beef steak we served was too tough and threw the steak on my manager's body. Unlike other local restaurants, we can't do anything because we attach importance to service to our guests.

Another example of an incident is a guest buying a lunch menu and taking it home. Not long after, the guest brought back a rice box that was almost filled to ask for a replacement on the grounds that there were cockroaches in the box. We suspect that it was the guest who put a cockroach in the box. Then he asked us to substitute another lunch menu as a substitute.

Sometimes we have to deal with accusations and complaints from guests that don't make sense, but it trains me mentally and how to communicate with different types of people.

Task of cleaning the restaurant and picking up rat carcasses with the manager

Since the male employees are just me, my manager, and the employees in the kitchen, the task for the cleanliness of the restaurant, such as the outside wall, the billboard at the top of the entrance, and cleaning the back hallway of the restaurant, falls to my manager and me.

The task of cleaning the exterior walls and billboards is a routine job each week. However, the task of cleaning the back aisle of the restaurant is usually done every month. One day, we started smelling a bad smell in the hallway, then my manager and I pushed out a large shelf where the employees' personal belongings were stored and found a number of rat carcasses.

At that time, my manager was in charge of holding a plastic bag, and I used a tool to pick up the rat carcasses. The rats seemed to have been dead for a long time; when we picked them up, their bodies were already separated.

In the next article, I will tell you how I continued to communicate with friends in Indonesia even though the internet was not common at that time.