Part 1
There I was, about 3 years ago, heading to my first day of work at the new job. Having spent all of my savings, I grudgingly was returning to the wonderful world of work. With a degree under my belt, one might wonder what job I was about to start. Could it be a teaching job or perhaps a job at the bottom of the ladder in some publishing house? No, I was poised to enter the food service industry.
Had I ever worked in the food service industry?
No, not other than a few months at a fast food restaurant at the
impressionable age of 14. Nonetheless, I was ready to lose myself in the
dishroom of a large food court facility serving the student population of a
prominent university. The management had been only too happy to honor my
request to work exclusively in the dishroom. I soon found out it was the
job most loathed and looked down upon by the other workers.
My first shift was 11 AM to 5 PM, not bad for a first day. I arrived early and dressed in the stench-ridden locker room. I had been issued a striped polo shirt, hat, and full-size apron. I punched in my time card and walked out through the food court to the utilities room, the official name for the dishroom. Through the double doors I went. The first thing I noticed was the large dish machine that took up most of the space in the room. I walked to the back of the room where all the employees were lounging around. It was still the slow period before lunch and several people leaned on a stainless steel table working on a crossword puzzle. As I looked at them with their shirts untucked and most not wearing an apron, I suddenly felt self-conscious wearing my apron properly hung around my neck and knotted around my waist, my shirt tucked in. The guy in charge easily weighed in at 400 pounds and wore the red shirt and hat of a supervisor. After introducing me to everyone, he instructed someone to show me how to “truck the silverware and trays. Apparently this was the hated job customarily passed onto new employees.
“Trucking” involved stocking the clean silverware that was distributed among some plastic cylinders, forks in one, spoons in another, etc. The cylinders sat in the top shelf of a steel cart and the trays sat on the bottom shelf. The job of the trucker was to roll the cart out and refill the two stations in the food court where the students picked up their silverware and trays. I quickly figured out why the job was disliked. When it got busy, silverware went fast and as the students lined up to get into the food serving area, the trucker had to fight her/his way to the station in order to refill everything. None of the customers seemed to realize that if they didn’t get out of the way they wouldn’t get silverware or a tray. They grabbed for everything, taking it off the cart before I had a chance to fill up the stock, all the while holding some inane conversation with their fellow lunch mates. They reminded me of a pack of mules all following a single carrot dangling from a string. It was a frustrating experience that got worse the busier it was.
There were two other job stations in the dishroom. Two employees usually worked at the front of the dish machine, unloading the trays, plates, and silverware. This was by far the easiest job. The plates were stacked into buggies that could be wheeled out to the different food shops. Ideally, four people worked in the back of the dishroom. Two people stood on each side of the room as the trays came in on conveyor belts. One person threw the silverware into a soaking tank and dumped the considerable food waste into the trashcans. The second person took the empty plates and trays and loaded them into the dishwasher. When the silverware tanks filled up, the baskets were emptied onto a sorting table. The dirty silverware was sorted into plastic cylinders that sat in a plastic holder and then the holder was placed into the dishwasher. The silverware went through twice and then could be put out for use.
This system worked fairly efficiently when there were enough people to cover all stations and those people worked up to their potentials. Unfortunately, this was a rarity. For one thing, the management seemed to consider the dishroom to be simply a pool of employees from which to pick from when other shops were short-handed. This meant that the dishroom started out almost every day in a state of short-handedness, because inevitably people called in regularly with some lame excuse as to why they couldn’t work (not that I was never guilty of such behavior).
The dishroom supervisor, Rick, would make out a schedule every day to assign people to certain workstations. This was to prevent any quarreling between workers. However, once I got a chance to work in the back it became evident that I was quite efficient at clearing trays. So, thankfully, I rarely had to work as the trucker. The coveted job was to work at the front of the dishwasher, although for some reason I hardly ever got to work there. However, I was still new at the job and it didn’t bother me too much. I naively thought I could handle several jobs at once, and it didn’t immediately occur to me that I was doing the work of perfectly capable people who were content to sit back and let me do their work.
One employee in particular was known for this type of behavior. Mona was a short squat woman who had some form of disability that caused her to be slow moving. No one wanted to work with her on a conveyor belt because she wouldn’t hold up her end of the work. I didn’t know this, and so I would be doing three quarters of the work, clearing trays and putting the dishes on the machine, while Mona slouched against the railing.
The other workers in the dishroom at the time that I started were actually all fairly decent workers compared with some of the ones I would work with later on. The dishroom would never be as clean and well run as it was with that original crew. And it wasn’t Rick who kept it that way. It was the regular employees who kept up with the cleaning. Rick had been there 3 years and would still be there when I left. After working there so long, he exerted as little effort as was necessary.
Until the end of the school year I had the same schedule: Mondays and Sundays off, 11-5PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and 12:30-9PM on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. I did make one minor adjustment during the second semester of school (the work year ran identical to the school year). I switched Fridays and Tuesdays so I could get out at 5PM on Friday and be able to socialize a little. Since the town was a college town, the weekend was the best time to have parties and hang out. All of my friends were still in school, so if I wanted to hang out with them, Friday was the best night.
One of the assistant managers, Cathy, was in charge of scheduling. She actually held more power than the head manager, Kevin. The employees hated Cathy, basically because she was a total bitch. Kevin, although technically only a figurehead, was well liked because he actually seemed to care about the employees and took their feelings into consideration. Most of the workers I talked to had some personal vendetta against Cathy. The worst I’d heard was from Jack, a local high school kid who worked there. Apparently, Cathy had slept with Jack’s dad, leading to his parents’ subsequent divorce. Now if that’s not a good reason to hate someone, I don’t know what is. Cathy had a reputation for having slept her way to the position she was in. She also had supposedly been fired from every other dining hall on campus, and the food court was her last chance to work for the university. This would become ironic later on.
Months passed, and I grew to hate the 12:30 to 9PM shift. I liked the people who worked during the day, but they all left at 4:30 and then I was left with Liz, the evening supervisor, and a bunch of lazy shiftless high school and college kids who were more concerned with socializing than with working. Working this shift involved dealing with the worst part of the lunch rush, all of the dinner rush, and cleaning up after each one. The day shift, 8:30-4:30, was coveted and very hard to attain at this time. In short, I was stuck with the schedule I had.
Liz was a good worker, although she was developing carpal tunnel syndrome. The job was killing her slowly. She wasn’t capable of doing the amount of physical work that she was responsible for. I helped her out as much as I could, but the other deadbeats who worked in there at night were worthless.
One day I got a glimpse of what the day shift was like. There were some special cleaning projects that needed to be done and I was allowed to come in at 8AM. A lot of sitting around occurred in the morning. There was an excess of workers and a limited amount of work to be done in the 2 1/2 hours before the place opened. Two of the dishroom employees worked cleaning the grill and fryers over in the Grill, Inc., located on the west end of the building. It was a separate dining facility that cooked its own fast food fare, but shared some of the same storage space and equipment as the food court. These two employees, Greg and Amy, worked there from 7-9AM and then came over to the dishroom and worked until 3PM. By the time they got to the dishroom in the morning it was practically all set up for opening, and so everyone sat around for an hour and a half.
I liked the idea of working the day shift. I could get used to this, I thought. And when Greg landed a job elsewhere, I had my chance. Greg worked 7AM-3PM. Since I lived 5 minutes by foot from the food court, I figured getting there that early wouldn’t be a problem. Kevin gave me the OK, and so I came in early a couple of mornings while Greg trained me. The job was simple: break down the grill, clean it, and put it back together. After that you helped out in the dishroom if they needed it, but chances were you’d sit around until opening time. Getting out at 3 was the best part; you didn’t have to hang around during the slow period in the afternoon and clean up the wreckage from the lunch rush.
I was all set to start this new schedule, when I started hearing rumors that I wouldn’t be allowed to switch. That place was built on rumors. Apparently, Cathy thought I was needed too badly in the food court. Did I ever hear this from her personally? No, eventually Kevin conceded that I wouldn’t get the job because I was too important to the evening and weekend shifts (i.e. I was the only one who actually worked when I was there). So now I had a reason to hate Cathy. She had robbed me of a cushy 7-3, M-F position, and she wasn’t even the head manager. This showed how much power she actually did hold, and was a forewarning of what was to come. I began to detest her as much as all the other workers did.
Losing that opportunity disillusioned me quite a bit. I was beginning to see firsthand the politics being played out within the ranks of management. And it was obvious that the wage workers were merely pawns in the game. What they wanted meant nothing to the managers, as they clawed each other in a fight for power and money. It was ugly; the hierarchy of power there was like nothing I had ever witnessed in my many previous jobs.
Naturally, these feelings had a certain effect on the quality of my work. Having determined that the managers didn’t give a crap about me, and that they were willing to work me to death without so much as a “thank you” or a “job well done” pat on the back (not to mention they weren’t authorized to give raises), I decided that it wasn’t worth my while to give 100%. Yet I still worked harder than most of the employees there. A lot of my co-workers had come to the same conclusion that I had, and they were determined to do as little work as was necessary in order to still get paid without getting fired, or even reprimanded. Sadly, this was very easy to do. You had to screw up in a big way to get fired from this job.
The dedication of the average food court worker came through most clearly during wintry weather conditions. If snow was on the ground, although we were considered required emergency personnel at the university, hardly anyone would show up. It was the perfect excuse to get out of work and not be penalized, or have to produce a doctor’s note. Later on it would become a lot harder to get away with calling in on a snow day. Snow days were easy; I worked them all, and even got a crappy certificate in the mail to thank me for my dedication. When it was snowing, business was slower and the lack of staff required the use of paper plates and plastic ware for the benefit of me and whoever else decided to show up for work in the dishroom.
Paper and plastic were the only two words the dishwasher liked to hear come out of a manager’s mouth. Probably the only ones we ever listened to, as well. If a manager was ranting about something to me, I would tune, nodding my head occasionally, ending the conversation with “OK.” Anyway, paper and plastic meant an easy day for the dishwashers (albeit an extremely wasteful one considering the flagrant use of non-reusable materials). Just pick the tray up off the line and dump it all in the trash. Then put the tray in the machine and that was it.
If snow days were the best days for working in the dishroom, the worst days were those on which I was running a fever. The dishroom was at least 10-15 degrees hotter than the rest of the food court. The humidity sucks all the energy out of you. I almost passed out on a couple of occasions. One guy with chronic bronchitis had a note from his doctor saying he couldn’t work in the dishroom because of the heat and humidity. I got bronchitis twice while working there; the only two times I ever had it in my life.
Part 2
The time clock phenomenon never made sense to me. Employees were allowed to clock in 5 minutes before their shift. So, every morning at 8:55, a writhing mass of green-shirted half-wits pawed over each other in order to reach the time clock, reminding me strikingly of oily hogs rolling around in a mud bog. Poor, every last one of them, they all knew it; they’re never going anywhere and they all had their own way of dealing with it. One way was to try their damnedest to get out of the place 5 minutes before 5:30PM. If they accomplished that then they could breathe a sigh of relief. For me, the thought of being clustered up around that many people makes me nauseous. I’d rather wait until the hallway clears, even if it means clocking in late.
I’ve already mentioned how much I hated trucking. But sometimes it was not to be avoided. I was out there one day when it was real busy. Bent over, stacking trays, I worked fast amidst the pack of wild animals clamoring for silverware and trays. A girl, in her haste, dropped a fork on my head.
“Sorry,”
she says brightly, and then, when I don’t respond, she
laughs.
Well, that was too much for me.
“What the hell is wrong with you? You drop a fork on my head and then you laugh? What if it had stuck in my eye and blood started spurted everywhere – would you have laughed then? Huh?”
The girl looked around nervously. There was quite a crowd by now. I felt compelled to face them.
“What kind of a society are we living in?” I practically screamed, “What kind of monsters are we producing? Have all your parents raised you to laugh at another’s misfortune, or are this young lady’s parents the only ones to blame? Or perhaps this is a symptom of our diseased society as a whole?”
At this point a manager grabbed me and yanked me into the dishroom, as I continued yelling at the top of my lungs.
After a week’s suspension for that little outburst, I decided to lay low for awhile. One might think I would have gotten fired for such a blatant attack on a customer. However, as I stated before, it was quite difficult to lose your job at this institution. The dishroom was full of derelicts and degenerates who couldn’t handle direct contact with the public. There was Curtis, the Vietnam vet with the bum leg (from a bad case of athlete’s foot, so he told me), who used to cuss out the customers when he worked out in the dining room, wiping tables. We were also proud to have a tall African lady on our team, affectionately nicknamed Sleeping Beauty because of her tendency to fall asleep at whatever station she was working at in the dishroom. She worked at a fast food joint from 5AM to 11AM and from 9PM to 2AM. So for the 8 hours that she worked with us she had to catch up on as much sleep as possible.
There were others, too. Jack and Chris were two high school kids who were working there when I started. Jack was from Florida and wore only a thin sweatshirt all through the cold Virginia winter. Chris had spent some time in the local mental institution, and was at that time attending a special school for kids who had “problems.” They both did a lot of drugs and skateboarded constantly. In fact, on some nights they would come to work, clock in, and then go skateboarding downtown. At 9PM, they would return to clock out and go home. They were never caught. One night they came in loaded on acid. All night they were dropping plates on purpose so they could watch them shatter into a million pieces. They constantly nagged me to let them take out the trash so they could go smoke cigarettes. I never understood why they wanted to use acid at a place like the food court.
These boys liked to start food fights, as well. Whatever came in on a tray was used as ammunition. Bowls of corn, mashed potatoes, entire cheese steak sandwiches. The miracle was they never seemed to get into much trouble. Chris would come in to work at least half an hour late every day. Like I said, it was nearly impossible to get fired.
However, occasionally management liked to single out certain “bad seeds,” those who wouldn’t always do every shit job assigned to them, or at least not without some argument. These employees were often good fairly reliable workers, but they liked to work on their own terms, which naturally went against general policy regarding employee behavior. Most of these workers were badgered so consistently that they eventually quit or were fired once management had set up a reasonable situation for such action.
One manager, in particular, was known for haranguing these troublemakers. Harold’s favorite thing to do was come up to you and say, “C’mere and let me show you something.” Without thinking, you’d follow him out into the food court and he’d point out some mashed potatoes or something that had been spilled on the floor. Then he’d tell you to mop them up.
One time he came up to me:
“Got a minute? I’d like to show you something,” he says.
He led me into the men’s room and indicated the remains of some hung over frat boy’s Sunday meal of chicken and green beans he’d puked up on the floor.
“Sorry,” I said, “I draw the line at that one. Go find some other sucker for this job.”
For some reason, I could get away with stuff like that every once in awhile. After a certain period of time, the managers stopped nagging me about stupid crap like tucking in my shirt because they knew it was a lost cause. Other people weren’t so lucky. Harold got onto this one guy Donny who was working there in the drink cooler, stocking all the bottled drinks. Donny had an explosive temper and hated Harold, mostly because Harold picked on him all the time. He made sure Donny always had something to do. There were a couple of incidents where, after an argument with Harold, Donny smashed the glass doors of the cooler. He was suspended several times, and finally there was a showdown. During a particularly heated argument, Donny clenched his fists and got real close up in Harold’s face. Anyway, Harold claimed Donny hauled back like he was going to hit him, and so he called the police. Well, that was the last we saw of Donny. Everyone wished he had actually hit Harold.
Most of the frustration the employees felt was caused by actions of management, namely the desperately stupid rules that were constantly being created and enforced. One day it was very busy in the dishroom; trays had been coming in stacked 3 or 4 high on the conveyor belts, food spilling onto the floor. Cathy walked in with Doris, another newer manager. Cathy wanted to show her the trouble spots in the dishroom, things that needed to be cleaned daily that weren’t getting done. There was a temporary lull in the influx of trays, and Tom was sitting down on one of the metal baskets that we soaked the silverware in. For some reason, Tom never caught on that if a manager walked in that he should stand up and make some attempt to look busy.
“Does this look like a chair?” Cathy asked, holding up the basket Tom had been sitting on.
Tom made some lame attempt to smooth things over. Cathy and Doris just continued around the room. After they left, we got another rush. As I noticed myself working harder, I looked around and saw that Tom was nowhere to be seen. I went outside into the dining area and looked everywhere. Finally, I saw Doris and asked her if she knew where Tom was.
“He’s shaving,” she said with a smug look on her face.
“It’s that busy in there and you’re making him shave one lousy day’s worth of beard growth off his face? We’re getting slammed in there. The guy scrapes half-eaten food off plates into a trashcan. What difference is it going to make if he has a few hairs on his face? He’s got plenty more on his head and you’re not making him shave that.”
She just shrugged and told me that they employee handbook specifies that all employees shall be clean-shaven.
The managers there were forever getting on these power trips and enforcing the stupidest rules, just to make themselves feel big. This incident was typical. Most of the time the rules never made much sense. During the spring of my first year there, they issued us dark blue uniform pants, two pairs each. I thought this was great because I was sick of ruining my own pants. I didn’t have a lot of money to go buying pants for work. So we have the pants for a couple of months, and then the place closes down for the summer. Upon returning in the fall, we’re told that we could only wear black pants now. They spent all that time and money getting the pants and making sure all the employees had two pairs in the right size, and then they were telling us we couldn’t wear them. I didn’t even own black pants, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to go buy some when I had two perfectly good pairs of blue ones that they had issued me. So I kept wearing the pants and no one ever said a word about it. All around me people were being sent home for wearing the dark blue pants, but for some reason I had entered the period when no one nagged me about anything.
Another thing that the managers used to harass the dishwashers about was having towels in our back pockets. Apparently, one of the fat cats who worked upstairs (literally) witnessed an unnamed employee go into a bathroom stall to take a crap and, naturally, his towel dragged on the floor when he pulled his pants down. Well, after that incident, every manager was on the warpath about towels. I got warned a couple of times in the beginning of the campaign, but kept on doing it. If you work in the dishroom, it’s essential to have a towel at all times. I wasn’t going to sacrifice that need just to satisfy the petty whims of some jerk-off upstairs. Other people, like my friend Carl, never heard the end of the towel rule. They’d be walking around behind him, yanking his towel out of his pocket and ranting about how disgusting it was and how the health department would jump all over that. Carl was one of those “bad seeds” who would eventually be fired.
* Names have been changed
Well, that’s it. Kind of an abrupt ending, I know, but that’s how I chose to end it the first time, so I decided to leave it that way. It was intended to be a series, of which I ended up scrapping, and/or breaking into smaller segments, the subsequent sections. To read some of these segments, see the “Vignettes” section, which I’ll be adding to in the future as I gradually transcribe more food court anecdotes from the scraps of paper I used to scrawl on in the bathroom stall at work.