job series part 2: The Landing

When I was 16 I managed to have no job at all. It was an awesome summer of running, playing basketball /volleyball almost full time with after run/game downtime barbecuing and swimming in our pool.
Remember this was pre massive drinking habit, and we (Ben,Mark,Adam,Cam,Brendan,Ross,and Myself) were far too clueless to impress girls.
So while I didn't have any money or girl prospects at 16 it ended up beeing an ok trade off for a mostly enjoyable vacation like summer.
My parents and a first girlfriend would conspire to make sure that neither trend was repeated in my 17th year.

A friend of the family was working in a marina restaurant just out of town and somehow him and my father managed to get me hired without a resume, interview, or my knowledge that I was up for the job. I would be washing dishes for and hourly wage of $5.85 (remember this is in 1992 so that would be like $6.50 today).
I made up for my low hourly wage be working sometimes up to 17 uninterrupted paid hours a shift. My shortest day would be 11 hours.
At 17 with no real job experience and a questionable work ethic I quickly passed 6 others to become the number 1 dishwasher at the Landing and was rewarded with 6 shifts a week. I was a little puzzled because before my promotion I hadn't considered myself a good dishwasher but my manager explained that in my first 3 weeks I had stood out amongst my peers by doing things like
1. showing up for all of my shifts
2. not hiding dishes when it was a busy night and I wanted to go home.

I guess hiding entire busbins full of dirty dishes to be found later by chefs and management was a pretty common and unpopular practice. The downside was that by doing all of my dishes and other duties I would be working until 3 or 4 in the morning sometimes.

Luckily I freaking loved it there- the alcoholic cooks would make me whatever food i wanted, all of the servers were hot college girls, and everyone was nice to me because the alternative was going back to older dishwashers who didn't give a crap.

here is one of my favorites from the literally hundreds of drinking stories that the cooks would tell me. (I don't really swear that much so if you could just randomly insert curse words it will help with the realism.)

Ed: "OK so like we are at the cottage and the Saturday party is bigger than we think and we run out of beer which was surprising because we brought up a lot of beer*. So we are upset because we still have a day at the cottage but it is really remote and it is Sunday anyway and everything is closed. Now there is no way that we can make it though the night with no booze, so what we do is take nylons and stuff and we filter all of the bottoms of the beers from the big party last night and drank all that"

Me: why umm did you filter the beer?

Ed: you know, to get out all the cigarette butts and shit.

Me: cool.


So I spent most of the days peeling potatoes and stuff with the kitchen guys and the nights talking with the waitresses who, in retrospect, I should have been trying to make-out with but at the time just trying to flirt with pretty older girls was an end in itself. Also despite being shy and now cringe inducingly un-smooth my running success and twin status had provided me with a brave new girlfriend in the same time period. I even had a cool new nickname.

Nickname???

One night I vividly remember picking up the plug to one of giant stand-up fans you would find in a kitchen with no air conditioning- Shaking off the excess water - and plugging it in.
there were puddles everywhere in that part of the kitchen and I was really tired so I kind of forgot about the water/electricity thing. It was actually kind of cool because a giant electricity ball seemed to shoot 15 inches out to the right and then there was a smaller blue ball on the left and then every light in the restaurant went out. The outlet was still on the wall but melted like those clocks in that painting. I was unhurt.
The electrician drinking at the bar explained that I had "fucked up the restaurant good" and was lucky to be unhurt. They were able to fix it eventually and the managers were cool about it and also that is when they really started to call me "Danger Boy".
Over the course of my two years there I would also manage to cut myself numerous times, almost suffocate mixing uncomplimentary cleaning chemicals, and go to the hospital twice with bleach in my eye.

Through my hard work and lack of litigiousness I was promoted over my two summers from "dishwasher" to "dishwasher/sometimes buffet server" to "dishwasher/buffet server/sometimes server" and my pay rose to almost $8 per hour.

I will have to save judgement until i go through all of my jobs but a quick scan suggests my status in terms of being a valued employee may have peeked as a 17 year old dishwasher. It would be 10 years until I worked in a restaurant again.

Next Week: Feminine Hygiene and Family Planning.



*you were supposed to be providing you own curse words here but if you are having trouble an example would be to replace "lot or beer" with "fucking fuck-load or beer" sorry grandma.