My New Professional Challenge
HAVANA TIMES – After a year and a half without taking a vacation, the butcher department manager where I work has taken a month off. His responsibilities, which are very important for the supermarket, are now being partially handled by management and partially by me.
From my point of view, it’s an excellent learning opportunity, but also a chance to aim for future promotions, which would mean less physically demanding work, though with much more responsibility. It would also come with a substantial salary increase.
My professional growth in this company has been almost meteoric. In just a year and a half, I went from restocking vegetables to covering for the manager during his vacation. The formula is simple: be organized and take the job seriously.
When I started working at the butcher department, I knew nothing about meat, or sales, and my Portuguese was barely good enough for basic communication. Every customer seemed like an insurmountable challenge, and each day felt endless.
But I learned. First, the meat codes to input on the electronic scale, then how to differentiate the cuts, and little by little, the company’s rules as well. I also learned how to deal with the customers at a market located right next to a favela. So, from a clerk, one day I became a butcher.
When I achieved that, I felt like I had reached the sky.
A few months later, I was promoted to leader of the butchers. The leap might seem simple, but it was full of days of extreme exhaustion, professional disagreements, personal attacks, failures, learning, stress, finger cuts, cold arms and back, colds…
There were still long days of intense work, and problems with staff members questioning how a foreigner could rise from nothing and become their boss.
It was hard, because I often worked with a reduced team, which meant doing the work of two or even three people. And there were also those who aspired to the position and tried to undermine my work.
I had to deal with all of that and still deliver excellent service.
The work I’m doing now is much more complex, not only because I’m doing something I’ve never done before, but also because of the absence of my boss, who is a great butcher.
Meat orders, planning, coordinating staff—these are among the responsibilities of a manager. This work even takes up part of my time at home, but I enjoy it. It has given me access to a dimension of my profession that I find much more appealing than being a butcher or a team leader.
It’s just a step forward, a trial, but I feel like I’m passing it, even though it hasn’t been easy. I’m learning a lot and I want to keep learning. It’s a way to prepare myself for the day, if God wills it, when I’ll have my own butcher shop.
In 1863, my great grandfather arrived in NYC fleeing a starving Ireland as a 16 year old, tall lanky teenager. In the dock, he was questioned by some soldiers of his age and intentions. Be some what scared, he lied and said 19 and wanted to be an American. They said sign these papers and a month later he stood at Gettysburg in Union blue with a rifle. He returned after the war with traumatic stress, married and had eleven children. His oldest, my uncle Michael was apprenticed as a butcher at 8 years old, living in the dark basement of the butchers shop to support his parents and siblings. By 12, he owned the shop, at 16, he owned 12 and by the time the First World War came, he controlled the beef going to Europe buying 80 rail cars of beef each week. He never forgot his family, his people or friends needs funding churches and hospitals. Blood, sweat and tears will bring prosperity, it isn’t easy to follow dreams but I know you can.