My stint as a food server at a banquet at the Swissotel left me feeling so exhausted that any thoughts of continuing this as a part-time thing flew right out the window.

For one thing, the hotel expects us to portion out ALL food, not just the soup, dessert and noodles. Of course being the tortoise that I am, I portion really, really and, I mean really, slowly. I am so bad at it that even though initially the thing that I feared most was dropping the dishes, I became more afraid of portioning out the food than of breaking anything as the night wore on. Then I nearly spilt a few drops of the sauce for the fish on a guest but luckily she was wearing her napkin, which protected her outfit.

Even before the actual event started, we had this mind-boggling briefing on what to do. The manager rattled on about our grooming, what drinks were available, how to portion stuff and even how to portion the fish!

This is how you're supposed to divide it:

At least my mentor was quite nice, so he did most of the work and I mostly helped to clear the plates :) I'll definitely appreciate my servers next time round and won't complain about the food arriving so slowly. I know I was running around like a headless chicken: setting plates, collecting food, portioning, clearing side plates, and going back to step 1.

It's a good thing my event was a Chinese dinner. If it was a Western banquet, I'd have to fiddle about with pieces of cutlery, 3 different glasses cluttering the table and plates which are in the way.

It was a definite eye-opener but never again.