I started a new job as a dishwasher at an Australian pie restaurant Saturday evening. That I managed to get the job strikes me as sheer good luck: on Wednesday I responded to the Craigslist ad with a flippant anti-corporate tirade as a way of telling the business owner about myself, whereupon I was surprised to hear back from her asking me if I could come in Thursday for an interview ... and even more surprised that the interview went well enough for her to hire me out of a total of five applicants (I was pretty tired that day, having woken up at four and gone canning early as a result). I guess I seemed like a serious, motivated, and culinarily sophisticated enough guy?
Or the other four guys were inarticulate dolts. Apparently the guy I replaced was fired because he walked off the job during a rush to smoke a cigarette, and was gone for over half an hour, and hadn't even told anyone he was leaving! I wouldn't be surprised if it was the look of indignant consternation that crossed my face upon hearing this during the interview that got me hired; you just don't do that shit!
I'm only working Thursday through Saturday evenings, probably in total an average of sixteen hours per week. Manageable, considering my legs and my social ineptitude and the fact that I haven't worked in any official payroll capacity in almost nine years ... well, okay, almost one-and-a-half years if the Georgia Hotel is to be counted. Saturday impressed upon me that this isn't a typical madhouse food factory hand dishwashing job; most restaurants will squeeze as much prep out of a dishwasher as they can, but since we receive pies delivered from the sister restaurant that's in charge of pie production I'll probably never be beleaguered with much of that ancillary duty.
Yeah, I totally lucked out, and I'm going to work hard for these guys and keep this job. Saturday wasn't busy because people were carousing the streets in costumes and getting wasted, so it turned out to be a perfect day for training. It came as quite the surprise to me that I figured everything out so quickly and no longer needed any guidance after a couple hours into the shift; either the job really is easy or I have a sort of subconscious eidetic recall when it comes to restaurant work. I was even told by the manager that already on my first day I was out-performing another dishwasher who's been working there for years; awkward and somewhat impolitic on her part.
