Assisting
in its pure form, is serving ie
assisting
is service.
Assisting
is serving people rather than
moi.
It's a calling. I love
assisting.
Assisting
comes in many forms. It has many expressions. The one I love the
most was known as day service. Day service provided the
service so that
Werner,
his staff and guests were supported in their meetings ie they were
taken care of / served while they worked. It was both my
privilege
as well as my good fortune to serve in day service myself, and to
also manage the day service team. How was day service set up? How
was it all planned?
For starters, it wasn't night service. Assembling a
team for night service would have been easy. Mostly, people don't
work at night. Many more people would have been available for
service at night. Assembling a team for day service
would have been a challenge were it not for the fact that a tight,
dedicated, committed team of people truly loved day
service, and they loved
being around Werner
and his staff and guests. They loved ensuring they were taken care
of and had everything they needed to get the job done in a relaxed
and enjoyably supportive environment. Day service wasn't
considered
work. It was an opportunity to
discover
who you are in service.
People clamored to take time off work during the day
to
participate
in day service. Filling all the hourly slots during the day, was a
breeze. Here is how a typical call on my list went: "Taylor it's
Laurence.",
"What time?", "2:30?", "I'll be there, bye!" (click). After the
hour ended they stayed, reluctant to leave. Part of that was the
space.
A lot of it was
Werner.
Primarily it was the service.
Serving tea and (non-alcoholic) drinks is easy. Look: there are
only so many ways you can add ice cubes to a diet Coke. With those
requests, the focus was on the presentation itself: immaculate,
impeccable, and rapid. Cappuccinos are another order of things
altogether. In the making of the perfect cappuccino, there are a
lot of moving parts, all of which have to be
mastered.
And this being
Werner's monastery
within a monastery,
if you hadn't
mastered
the art of
making the perfect cappuccino, you would undergo further training
until you could. Only then would you be allowed to do day service
again. In the ordinary course of events, such
rigor
is often deemed to be excessive. In day service it was
considered
to be the mark everyone (in
their heart of
hearts)
aspires to.
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