Last day of work

Though it's almost been a month since I finished work, I haven't shared all the events of my last day at Plaza Athénée. Perhaps I've been repressing the bad memories? Okay well it wasn't all that bad, but maybe I'm just jaded now.

During my six month stage, I witnessed quite a bit of hazing of other staigiares on their last day of work. One girl had raw eggs smashed on her head. The apprentice in the boulangerie had yeast (yes, fresh cake yeast), flour, butter, and egg wash poured all over her. Though my friends from Ferrandi gave me accounts of people being locked in a 'cage', crap dumped over them, and then being hosed down, I didn't really know what to expect.

Though I think I walked away pretty lucky; here's a note to any future stagiaires: do NOT tell them what day you're leaving. Of course this isn't completely avoidable since at least one person (whomever you report to) will know.

My last week started out with a cream puff to the face. Yes one of those lovely mignardises that I painstakingly piped, was smashed in my face by a chef de partie. He's probably the nicest guy I work with and in his words, worse things could/will happen. On my second day, of the last week, I was lucky enough to have chocolate batter (part of our marbled cake) smeared across my face. Well at least it tasted good and I tried to chase the offender down to give him a bisou. The third day we had made some fresh marshmallows and rolled them in sprinkles. They were quite gross and all but two made it into the trash. The other two gooey marshmallows? Smashed into my ears. It took me quite a while to clear my ears of that nasty mess.

On my last day, I tried to avoid any sort of confrontation. I knew that I had to be really careful and watch my back especially nearing the end of the day when we started cleaning. Post-cleaning, no one would try to attack me. While I was washing the sink, out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the chefs de partie (cdp) with a bucket of something. I didn't need to know what that something was, so I ran and got the brush to start scrubbing the floors and evade him. Well lucky for me, another apprentice knew that it was the cdp's birthday and decided to smear some roquefort cheese all over his face/glasses. Yours truly was hiding in the ice cream room. The cdp rounded on the apprentice with the bucket containing cherry juice and splashed him. Trying to protect myself, I was wise enough to also mention to the apprentice that it was another girls birthday that weekend. His present for her?  A bottle of egg yolks over her head.

Of course it was impossible for me to escape scathed-free; I ended up getting the rest of the cherry juice poured over my head and the bucket smashed on my head. As I bleached my chef whites, I couldn't help but think about how much I'm going to miss (and not miss at all) Plaza Athénée. It was definitely a good, character building, back-breaking experience.