Not all Chefs go to hell

Apprentaces

So this is potentially a large topic. When I think about apprentices I thought about all the hilarious situations they get themselves in, their  unearned sense of accomplishment, the whole watch out world I am walking in the room attitudes. But of course I that was me, 100 percent I had an enormous ego (probably still do), I made hilarious mistakes (hilarious in hindsight).
Recently I have been reading a lot of articles about how chefs hate hiring apprentices. They say that when you get a fresh graduate from culinary school they are unable to work long hours, there work is slow and sloppy. It really seems like culinary schools do not prepare students for the industry they are about to join, Food Network isn't really helping either. From my own view i see a lot of young cooks only being there because they want to be Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsey. I see a lot of people who want to be chefs but don't want to cook.
Regardless I feel the best way to deal with apprentices is to work with them, be honest and give them time to grow up, kids have egos and it takes time to break them.... The egos, not the kids.

I was working at a wilderness lodge on the Sunshine Coast in Canada, I had just turned twenty years old. One day I had to make some hamburgers with what ever, it was a pretty loose on recipes. So looking in the fridge for something to put in the burgers I can't find any onions, garlic. And I'm trying to think what else could I put in it, then I thought of my culinary school and I thought of mire pois( onions, carrot, celery), and I figure hey I have carrots they go with onions so they probably go with burger. So I chop up a bunch of carrots, season up the beef and through it all together.
Later that day the chef came up to me and said "hey Ian, did you make the burgers?" I say yeah, " hmmm I don't think I have ever seen carrots in a hamburger before......hmm" and that was it, it's stayed with me for years never gotten over how embarrassed I was.

In Norway the hotel had a couple apprentices. One was the classic couldn't work more than 6 hours, complained and how much work there was and how stressful everything is, she was fairly difficult to work with.
The other apprentice turned out to be a good friend of mine. He maybe wasn't the fastest or the productive but he was a hard worker and would work multiple 18hour shifts in a row without complaint.
One weekend he ( patty) invited me to join him in Sweden for some Game of Thrones exhibition. He loves Game of Thrones and I had never been to Sweden so I joined him. We stayed at some cheap hostel which was fine, we checked out the exhibition and that was kinda..... Time consuming.
Later that night we got some supplies from the store and we're going to make a stir fry for dinner. We met a couple American girls in the hostel and we ended up talk, we get on the topic of cooking for a living and obviously we embellish our abilities and offer to make them dinner.
I take most of the tasks onto myself the sauce the vegetables all the chopping and what not ( it's stir fry it's not complicated), I get Patty to just make the pasta. Maybe he was caught up in talking to the girls or maybe something else but he uses the smallest pot and puts in all the pasta at once.... About ten minutes later all the veg and the sauce is ready and I ask Patty about the pasta, he looks in the pot and of course the top of the pasta is completely raw and the bottom was burnt black, the girls give us a look like "oh you cook for a living so you?".
Apprentices.... Either way we ended up having  good night, but I never let Patty forget about it.
Also at one point a rather drunk possibly Russian man grew rather fond of Patty, his English wasn't so great but from what we understood he kept saying "horny come with me" Patty was very polite and refused but the Russian insisted "don't matter horny come with me", very good times.