A simple question prompted an unexpected answer
“When did the rota stop working for you?”
At first, the question sounded routine. The interviewer was asking about the practical side of running a busy restaurant: how the owner organised the team, dealt with absences and kept the evening service moving.
Across the table sat Simon, the fictional owner of a neighbourhood restaurant. Next to his glass of water was a weekly rota, folded at the corners and covered with arrows, crossed-out names and amendments in different pens. He had brought it as an example of how he used to organise staff.
There was a pause before his answer. Not because the question was difficult, but because the paper made the answer impossible to dress up.
“What actually went wrong on the evening you decided to change the way you planned shifts?”
Simon looked at the rota and ran a finger along one of the handwritten changes.
“We had the people in the messages. We just didn't have them on the rota.”
It was not an admission about a complicated technical problem. It was about something ordinary: changes had been agreed in conversations, but the piece of paper treated as the official schedule never caught up. In the course of the interview, he explained why he later moved his team’s working rota to Deputy rather than continuing to reconcile handwritten revisions.
