During the London Olympics I was working right next to the actual stadium. Despite this I don’t actually have any idea what happened during the actual sporting events. I was working as a waitress at Gourmet Burger Kitchen on the third floor of the Westfield shopping centre Stratford. It was absolutely mental we had a cue outside the restaurant with an hour to two hour wait for a table. When I closed my eyes I could see burgers.
Despite this I did get some up close experience with athletes. I was personally responsible for a large party of the Croatian Ice hockey team, they didn’t have any burgers but they did make multiple orders for onion rings, chips and ALOT of Budvar. I served the able bodied person on the gold medallist blind cycling doubles team, I don’t remember what they ordered but she was nice and was pretty happy with her win. Also, the family of an American Gold medallist diver. They asked for ranch sauce which we didn’t actually serve but I made them some thousand island dressing and they seemed pretty happy with that. Tom Daley came in once prior to the Olympics, but I wasn’t working that shift.
Working conditions weren’t the best. The restaurant was moving so fast we didn’t have enough time to clear tables properly so we had to grab a large grey bucket and just shove all the stuff off dirty tables into that then wipe the table down. The bar had to be restocked almost every half hour with ice creams for the milkshakes, cokes, sprites, beers it was pretty hard to keep everything cold. On top of this they cut breaks. You only had half an hour for lunch, although a good way to get out of the restaurant for a bit, was to take the large bins down to the skip on the bottom floor then you could have a smoke while you were there then rush back up to the restaurant.
To deal with the large demand they got a bunch of managers and supervisors from other GBK’s around Britain to help. This was not so much help as it just meant that there were more people to boss you around, many of whom were on massive power trips. However, most of the floor staff got along and we kept morale up with allot of singing. I did a rendition of “Sospan fach” and even though most of the staff were non English speaking let alone Welsh, they could join in with the “oi oi” between every verse.
We were all working somewhere around 60 hours a week so the Olympics were pretty much all we were seeing in-between sleeping. It was like a massive carnival I met people from around the world not only on a daily basis but pretty much on an hourly basis. I met one couple where the husband had been driving a really rich man around for a couple of days and the rich man as a sign of gratitude had given the man and his wife two really expensive tickets for the closing ceremony. There were also several times when something exciting happened during the sports and the entire Westfield erupted into cheering and applause.
I didn’t actually see any of the actual Olympics but I recon I did have a firsthand experience of what the Olympics seeks to achieve. I got to experience the collaboration of national identities from around the world revelling in a representative of their country achieving something great. If my grandchildren ever ask where I was during the London Olympics I will be able to say, I was serving burgers to the world.
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