A Work History

     At almost every one of my past jobs, I’ve encountered people who are ignorant of or, at best, loosely grasp aspects of employment I take for granted. For instance: Show up to your job on time. Most of the time, at least. And: Do your job. Do it for however long you’re on the clock. Obviously.

On the first day of one job I misjudged how long it’d take me to get there and arrived very late. A coworker said: “Don’t worry, I do that all the time.” I thought: You show up twenty minutes late all the time? He turned out to be the man assigned to train me. A detail: I rarely saw him simply smile. Often he studied a face for a moment, then smiled, slowly. At one point he left the room and another coworker, a great fan of American Idol, never missed an episode, once yelled at me to move so he could get out the door sooner to catch American Idol, turned to me, scratching his balls, and said: “Sometimes he disappears and no one knows where to find him.” (What's worse, a goblin appeared.) The man assigned to train me often took out his phone, stared at it, pressed buttons and stared, put it up to his ear, and I believe I once found him in the darkness of an obscure corner singing softly into it. He was friendly enough but eventually there was an upsurge in tension between us, caused by my confusion about his role: for days he’d been walking me through a job that, as I understood it, was his too, only he never did much. When I asked him about it to decide how to distribute the work fairly, he became agitated. “This is your job!” (So what’s your job? Freelance dishwashing advisor?) The manager heard him raise his voice from the next room and pulled me aside to see what was wrong. I asked her and she carefully explained: I wasn’t working with him. He was training me to replace him. He was transferred to another job in the same restaurant the next day, maybe. But apparently it wasn’t by choice and he didn’t like it. I was hunched over the sink, attacking a sheet pan with food scorched onto it someone demanded right away, a dishwashing machine operating noisily that would soon have to be reloaded to my right, a shelf filled with dirty dishes that would have to be cleared of food and organized and cleaned and dried and placed somewhere in the kitchen to make room for the next wave of dirty dishes to my left, moving at top speed, as one typically must as a dishwasher. In a steamy, windowless room that’s never entirely free of this rotten/wet funk. High-stress, low-paid, filthy work I’d discourage anyone from doing unless there are no other options and funds are dwindling. And I doubt I need to tell anyone who does not to do it long term—which would please management too, as a manager of another restaurant once admitted to me, because then there’s no obligation to pay that person more. He added that he loves immigrant employees because they’ll take whatever they can get, crowd together in an apartment to save on rent, “they don’t care!” The underbelly not highlighted often on one of your jolly food porno shows, though the restaurant would fall into chaos without the tireless exertions of a capable dishwasher. Surely one of the shittiest of the shit jobs. And the man who trained me (so to speak), standing around in my area, dressed in his new uniform, looked in my direction longingly and said: “I wish I were washing dishes.” Soon after the manager euphemistically informed me that he’d been fired.

Don’t show up to your job high. Or don’t get high at work. One would think. But there are those who get away with it. I’ve never understood why one would get high and do anything like go to work. Even if you’re one of those who has mastered the art of smoking weed, insisting that you’re perfectly functional and putting no one in danger, seems like a waste of a high (and a waste of money) to me. I once worked with a woman who smoked weed on her break and came back reeking of it, in a narrow, poorly ventilated space where people spend their whole shifts toiling around each other. The manager, a soft-spoken, gentle man, pointedly asked this coworker to instruct me on how to use the keypad for clocking in and out. She struggled to focus but got through it, as the manager looked on, sadly. (He left to find a new line of work not long after. She left within weeks, I think.) But he didn’t fire her then and there because at least she didn’t blow smoke in his face. The sturdier rule, based on experience, would be: Don’t get high on site. At another job, I never learned the name of a guy who got fired on his first day for smoking weed in a poorly ventilated bathroom other people use. He went through the trouble of looking for a job…interviewing for that job…training for that job…and couldn’t wait for his break to smoke weed.

A recommendation: Leave your toys at home. Employers are more concerned about company property than employee property, so it’s best to bring inexpensive, replaceable things in case of theft. But break time is the employee’s time and some understandably, if unknowingly, take the risk for the sake of their own relaxation and sanity. A rule: Remember to put your toys away. I worked for a semester at a copy place with, incidentally, the worst, most flagrantly rude customer service I’ve ever witnessed, people ready to exchange money for what the business offers treated as if they were beating on a bedroom door, requesting personal favors at 2 a.m. Once, as I hurried from one place to another to help someone, I tripped. A coworker had to be held back by her fellow pricks because she was about to fight me? She’d been charging her Gameboy and left the wire strung in the aisle behind the front counter, a high traffic area. I could have seriously hurt myself tripping on her toy at my job and she was angry with me. I didn’t apologize and my one regret in the field of copy machine operations is that her Gameboy didn’t go soaring across the room, into the wall, and blow up. (I will, however, apologize to Nintendo.)

And a related note: I once had a coworker who would leave his skateboard on top of the prep table during his shift. For readers unfamiliar with the layout of a restaurant kitchen, “prep” is short for “preparation.” A prep table is where your food is prepared. Enjoy your meal.

Make sure you have the equipment necessary for the job you’re hiring someone to do. By the time I applied for a job at one restaurant, I’d learned to ask the manager at the interview. She responded: Of course. As if it were a strange question. I should have persisted. I should have written a list. But I made sure to keep in mind her offhand remark that they’d been having trouble keeping dishwashers around, except one, an elderly man she quietly suggested was senile. On my first day she gave me the tour. First of all, another detail: this restaurant had the most disgusting employee bathroom I’ve ever seen. Opening the door, one was hit with an overpowering stench of toilet and, because it doubled as an open storage locker, the inside of a shoe. Near the entrance, in front of the sink, a pool of standing water one could hardly step around. And trash everywhere. I’ve been in bus station bathrooms in major cities that looked pristine by comparison. The tour continued and I was shown to the sink area. It was all standard, if slightly neglected, similar to the bathroom. And as I got started, I asked for the most basic piece of equipment after a sponge and soap, a pair of dish gloves. Not the kind for home cleaning but restaurant dish gloves—gloves that stretch to the elbow, that are thick enough to prevent cuts and abrasions otherwise unavoidable as one handles utensils and scrubs aggressively in hot water all day. The manager had no idea what I meant. She groped around and grabbed one thick leather glove used for pulling trays from the oven. That wouldn’t do, even if she were able to find the other. Then she settled on a combination of a cut glove, like a mitten with a plastic skin, and a loose disposable glove that came from a box of a hundred, both used for food prep, both wrist-length. I played along. Within the hour the disposable gloves had torn and the cut gloves underneath were discolored and sopping with crud. I knew where this was going and left before the end of the shift. The manager was stunned, whining, racking her brains for an explanation for yet another defection. The fact that she needed one told me what I needed to know about the job. The other employees seemed to see it coming. “There he goes,” one said plaintively as I walked out.

If you choose to make a coworker’s high-stress, low-paid job harder than it already is, by neglecting your responsibilities or idly flapping your gums or karate kicking near his or her head, prepare for that person to devise and execute a plan to make your job harder. And you’ll have no one to blame but yourself. I once worked at a restaurant where certain employees didn’t clear dishes of leftover food and neatly stack them, as they were supposed to, instead abandoning bins full of dishes, wordlessly leaving me to do their jobs. The manager chose not to enforce the rule. So rather than cleaning one type of utensil or plate all at once, permitting the coworker to take the rack used for loading them into the dishwashing machine, quickly go to one area of the kitchen and put them all away at once, I began, at no additional cost of effort, cleaning everything individually: One big plate, one medium plate, one small plate, one cup, one sauce container, and so on, for every single rack. To put them away, one was forced to do a circuit of the kitchen, every single time. Most took the hint and started doing their jobs correctly. A few others didn’t while grousing and sniffing about this heartless extra burden. Both outcomes were satisfactory.

And then there’s the person who inspired this piece. I knew she would be a problem from the first words out of her mouth: She was looking forward to “chilling” at the job. And she had just been hired as assistant manager, no less. I thought: Here we go. Anyone whose chief concern at a job is relaxing is a guaranteed headache, especially if he or she has authority. This person will never do the job properly, will complain about doing something approaching a proper job, and will be utterly useless should more serious action be required (for instance: settling a work-related issue). Then she said that her main ambition was to create a comfortable break room. I nodded uncomfortably. She took a quick disliking to me.

Near the end of our first full work day, she saw me with a broom in my hand and asked what I was doing. I said: “Cleaning up.” She said: “No, no, we’re going to be here tomorrow. You don’t need to do that.” I thought: Well, the store is open seven days a week. So by your logic, we’ll never clean. (Also, probably: Damn! I’m always right.) Instead I appealed to a higher authority: “The manager says to clean so that’s what I’m going to do.” She hesitantly accepted this, a leery expression on her face, not entirely convinced of the purpose of my task. In fact, she never figured out sweeping. I’ll put it this way, like our training videos: You see a pile of dirt on the floor. You have a dustpan and a broom. What do you do? (a) Use the broom to sweep the dirt into the dustpan. Then empty the dustpan into the trash. Finally, put the broom and dustpan away. (b) Forget the dustpan. Use the broom to sweep the dirt to a corner of the room. (c) Use the broom to sweep the dirt into the dustpan and put them away, leaving the dustpan filled with dirt. (d) Leave the dirt where it is. The floor will only get dirty again.

I saw this woman select every letter, at one time or another, except (a). She even (e) mopped without sweeping, leaving the mophead sooty and dotted with packing material. (And leaving the mop in the bucket instead of hanging it up on the wall clasps above the floor sink to let it drip dry. In the clasps were the brooms.)

Her approach to chilling at work, it turned out, wasn’t innovative, selective, and surreptitious but brazenly classical: long stretches of doing nothing. And there’s always something to do. During one shift, I made my way up and down the cleaning supply/auto supply/pest control aisle, filling the shelves from overstock and organizing, when I wasn’t pausing to perform cashier duties. She stood around an aisle or two over chatting with a couple of customers. That took up two hours. Then family members of hers showed up and she hung out with them in another aisle for about half an hour. Then she stood around behind the counter. That comes to about half my shift. Against store policy, she used the cash register to ring up her own purchases. (A verbal exchange, just for fun: I told her I was going on break. She said no. Mishearing her, I said, “You’re welcome.” When I realized my mistake, I proceeded to the break room.) And, before I could finish cleaning the store, she turned off the lights. It was 10:15 pm and she wanted to go home.

I wasn’t too sure whether the manager cared one way or another or even guessed what she was up to. Though I’d been quite clear about what kind of employee she was before, justice at work isn’t inevitable and sometimes, to avoid going through the trouble of hiring someone new, management will be highly lenient, making everyone else’s job worse. (Another work history could be written about those who somehow manage to keep these jobs despite everything, whose continued employment becomes deeply offensive.) But he was paying more attention than I realized, as I noticed him one day carefully sifting through old footage from the security cameras. At my next shift, in response to his written note about cleaning the entire store, I reported that I can’t clean with the lights turned off and suggested that he train his AM on elementary store upkeep. I’d purged my words of all sarcasm and derision. Let the facts, mildly listed, speak for themselves, I decided. But at the mention of her name, he scoffed and said he’d deal with her.

Then the next shift came and I learned that she’d quit. Distraught, I said: “     .” I took a register to count in the back. There, I found a written report on the desk, out in the open. Placing the cash register next to it, I couldn’t help but notice it was a warning for this now former employee…. Perhaps she quit in heated protest at being held accountable just for not doing her job. Or perhaps she realized this job, like most any one intends to keep, doesn’t provide the same comforts of reclining at home except with a paycheck thrown in and left out of disappointment to search for one that does.

The appearance of simplicity at the jobs I’ve done is deceptive. Depends on who’s doing it. I’ve never seen one that couldn’t be made arduous.