"What's 'Hell' in Spanish?"

I didn't have Hot Appetizer. For 3 days, Hot App showed me around the cold station. He'd taught me how to read the menu to find my mise en place¹ for the day. He'd given me a good idea of what quantities I'd need for a shift, and what I needed to do around the kitchen to close down for the night and get the restaurant set up for the next day. He'd worked cold station-salads and desserts, including a cheese plate-for three months and was moving over to Hot Appetizers, the station with the fryers and cold meat dishes. Most importantly, he followed me those three days, cleaning up when I got messy, and finding everything I forgot--and I forgot everything at least once--before an absence became a crisis.

I showed up early for my first solo day, forgetting that Hot App and I prepped so much the night before that there was very little to do. I putzed around, taking my time in an attempt to remember everything I needed. About an hour after I got there, the saute and fry cooks walked in and turned on the hood. Nothing. They flicked the switches a couple of times, and stood with the sous chef under the hood, listening for some sign of life. They checked the breakers. Nothing there. They called the hood guy, who flicked the switches, checked the breakers, and got up on a ladder for a better view of the hoods not working. He informed the fry cook and me-the people who matter, you know-that he couldn't fix the hoods until the next morning, because it was "burn-your-hands hot" on the roof. We decided not to tell him that at 92° F before turning on the equipment, it was "lose-a-cook-to-heatstroke hot" in the kitchen. Not that it would have mattered.

Hoods, or exhaust hoods, are required in kitchens to ventilate "heat, smoke, and grease-laden vapors" produced by equipment. While working in my pampered, seated, air-conditioned office job I'd occasionally heard of hoods going down, and coordinated their repair. But like first-class passengers being loaded onto lifeboats while the Titanic sank, I didn't give much thought to what was happening to the poor schmucks down in steerage.

Here's what: we found fans-initially two, then four-and turned them on the cooks. At least the hot air would be moving. The servers came in to get their helpings of family meal and brought us each a pitcher of ice water. One of them asked the fry cook "What's 'Hell' in Spanish?" Once service started, the servers would dart in and out, get their food, and refill our pitchers, while we spent the slow night sweating, bitching, and chugging water, going back to the prep line where the hood worked when we had nothing to do. Our ice creams, normally soft, were a sick joke, and I considered scooping in the walk-in, till I remembered that the walk through the kitchen would undo any progress I made. Then about an hour and a half before close, the utterly predictable happened: a compressor on a cooler overheated and shut down. We turned fans on the machine, as though a blast of 100ºF air would revive the motor, and packed all of the meat in ice. By the time I got home, I smelled like something that had been dead for days, and my illusions of the glamorous restaurant life were effectively shattered.

What in the heck is:

1. mise en place: "setting in place" in French, or "Everything in place" at the CIA. Or "mess in place" in the American South. Includes all ingredients for assembling an item, plus supplies like portioning utensils, pans and other preparation utensils, and plates. Source