Assignment for my creative writing class, see this post for context!
Day 9 - 10/3/19 Daily Writing Prompt: Your first job, your worst job, or… Assignment: First (or early) jobs make great fodder for both fiction and nonfiction. Our first work experiences take us out of our comfort zones, place us among coworkers for the first time, often with very different life experiences than our own. It's no wonder they prove so memorable. Free-write about one of your formative experiences at a first job. Be as vivid and concrete in your details as possible, aiming to show us (rather than telling us) what it felt like to be thrust into this situation, doing this kind of work. Just follow a memory.
“Don’t cover the rice like that, the customers like seeing the food they’re being served!” my supervisor barked at me. Customers?! I thought to myself, looking around my college dining hall at the bedraggled 18 year olds, shuffling around in their sweatpants and flip-flops with their trays full of pizza. “I noticed that the rice was getting dry, so I covered it,” I explained to her calmly. I adjusted my UCSC Banana Slugs hat, which was the acceptable alternative to the health board’s required hairnet. “Do what I say!” my supervisor spat at me, before storming off in a huff.
This was the second time I had been chastised for using my brain on the job. I’d only been working in the dining hall for a week, and I was already bored senseless. Serving up food at the “Global Cuisine” station in my dining hall (“Global” my ass – it was basically a poor man’s Panda Express) was just a series of repetitive actions. Grab a plate, scoop up whatever slop we were serving that day, plop on the plate. Grab, scoop, plop. Grab, scoop, plop. One, two, three. Same, old, thing. Kill, me, now.
On my previous shift, she yelled at me for separating the beef and broccoli into two piles: beef on one side, broccoli on the other. It was the obvious innovative solution for students continually requesting that I add more beef or more broccoli to the scoop on their plate. Instead of digging through the lumpy brown sauce to find the requested adjustment, I could readily access more of the bovine protein or verdant fiber with minimal effort. “What the hell do you think you’re doing with the food, this looks terrible!” she yelled at me, while she stirred up my carefully sorted piles back into an indistinguishable stew.
I learned that I vastly preferred working in the back of the dining hall, washing dishes. Yes, it was disgusting work – students liked to fashion artistic sculptures with their leftovers, mashing together their sandwich crusts with leftover soda, and creating a spire decorated with errant pepperoni and carrots from the salad bar. I was then tasked with scraping these revolting renderings into the trash, spraying the plates down with the pressurized water sprayer, loading them into the crates, pushing the crates into the industrial washer and dryer, and then unloading the scalding hot plates, stacking them into the carts. First In Last Out, the first plate in was the last plate out in the stack, I would think to myself – FILO vs FIFO (“first in first out”), just like we learned in my Data Structures & Algorithms class.
The work was labor intensive, and I’d return to my dorm room stinking of the aerosolized ketchup and mustard that the pressurized water nozzle would spray back onto me, my fingers calloused from stacking plate after boiling-lava-hot plate. But at least we were left alone back there, me and Jason (my co-worker who was also, incidentally, my weed dealer). No supervisors came to yell at us or micromanage. We listened to Tool and Metallica, and talked about our lives while we scraped the plates, stacked the cups, untangled the forks. One, two, three.