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What I Learned from a Sex-Crazed Short-Order Cook
- niggler 14y ago“WHEN IN THE HISTORY OF THIS RESTAURANT HAS ANYONE EATEN FROM THE BOTTOM OF THESE PLATES?" While not quite the same, I'm reminded of Jobs' comment regarding a furniture maker who made sure the backs of the furniture were finished
- ipsin 14y agoIn my world, plates are stacked on top of each other prior to use. Cleaning both sides is a good idea.
- rodly 14y agoHe was probably referring to cleaning (scrubbing, rinsing off, etc) the bottom of the plate prior to putting it on a rack that was about to be pushed through the dishwasher. The bottoms would be clean at this point, but it would be wasted time to spend extra seconds clearing visible food from the bottom of a plate.
- ricardobeat 14y agoIt's the exact opposite - his father was a furniture maker, and made sure to craft the 'hidden' parts of his work just as well as the visible ones, a lesson he carried on to Apple.
- will_work4tears 14y agoWell, the plates are stacked, so a dirty bottom plate can make another plate top dirty. Not sure the logic behind that.
- marshray 14y agoI had a similar formative experience as a dishwasher. However, the old man who ran the restaurant really liked you to scrub the carbon off the bottom of the pots and pans. To this day I have no idea why.
- lotsofcows 14y agoEx-army probably.
- marshray 14y agoHuh, interesting. I'd never considered that.
- kirillzubovsky 14y ago"When all hell is breaking loose, organize yourself first" - My favorite point in this story.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoCompletely - "when all around you are losing theirs" I always used to say every university student should tend bat or tables for a month - it teaches you more about customer service than a year of once a week customer meetings.
- brador 14y agoThe entire article has some great lessons to be learned. Worth a second read.
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoLove. This is the experience every young person needs, in order to grow up useful.
- sillysaurus 14y agoLove. This is the experience every young person needs, in order to grow up useful. Isaac Newton is evidence that you're mistaken. If young person with talent and ambition were to mistakenly believe you, the most common outcome is that they'd become shadows of their former potential a few years later.
- wpietri 14y agoIs Newton evidence of that? If I recall rightly, he had a pretty hard life as a kid. Learning how to work hard and get things done is definitely an experience every young person needs, and a high-school summer washing dishes will hurt nobody. I've seen plenty of people with talent and ambition but lacking the requisite execution skills. And I've seen people with much less talent make great progress because of their hard work.
- jamessb 14y agoWhen Isaac Newton came to Cambridge, he matriculated a subsizar, meaning that he effectively worked as a menial servant rather than paying fees. Relevant section of Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton - http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3ngEugMMa9YC&pg=PA71&lpg=PA7 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3ngEugMMa9YC&pg=PA71&...
- sillysaurus 14y agoThe commentator said, "Love. This is the experience every young person needs, in order to grow up useful." I took this to mean, "Every young person needs to experience love to grow up useful." i.e. a relationship. I hope nobody who upvoted me felt that hard work is unnecessary.
- cafard 14y agoScrubbing? I really have to wonder. I worked in restaurants as a high-school student 40 years ago, and at that time the dishwashers (human) put the plates into racks and shoved them into dishwashers (appliances). Manual intervention for tableware was limited to transfer to the racks at one end of the appliance, and from that the other.
- smoyer 14y agoWe sprayed the worst of the gunk off with a pressure nozzle after the plates (or whatever) was in the rack. Problem dishes (that we noticed came out of the dishwasher dirty) were set aside.
- ritchiea 14y agoI quit my first job out of college and did a few months of part time restaurant work as I figured out what exactly I wanted to do with myself professionally. We actually scrubbed dishes and that was 2010. We had a sanitizer that heated dishes to kills germs but it didn't clean them. This was in Brooklyn and a pretty common setup.
- stuff4ben 14y agoAs a former dishwasher and line cook at the local steak house when I was growing up, I relate almost exactly what this guy said. I was 15 and sucked at washing dishes. We had this one guy, Snoopy was his nickname. Dude was so fast at washing dishes I wanted to be exactly like him. But it was how he attacked it that stuck with me. Organize what you can, soak the stuff with caked on crap, wash what needs washing first (plates for cooks, silverware and cups for waitresses, biscuit pans, then baking pans), sling plates around like a madman, get soaked to the bone, and never let your feet stop dancing. And exactly like this guy, I too can sort silverware with each hand independently (I have to admit I'm pretty awesome at this). Speed, speed, speed was what Snoopy drove into me. To this day I do the same things as a developer/devops person at work. Organize, prioritize, speed, speed, speed...iterate.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoMy first job was as a dishwasher too, learned the same things from a dishwasher-turned-cook there. And to work hard. No one else was going to clean those dishes, and they had to be cleaned. Right now. Restaurant's signature was french onion soup, so we had these little crockware pots coated in melted cheese that Every Single Customer had to order. Ugh. Lots of scrubbing in very hot water. Dave was the cook's name, he was a drummer in a band in Athens Ga (drove up from Atlanta for every show) at the time when indie bands from there were the thing. He set my musical tastes on a track they never recovered from. It felt good to start buying records with money from my own job. It really did.
- thirdtruck 14y agoWhich band? Asking as someone also acquainted with the Athens music scene.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoOh Ok. A million years ago, in the dark ages.
- chris_mahan 14y ago
- flatline 14y agoI liked this story a lot, but I had a slightly different experience. I started washing dishes in a bakery over the summer, at age 12. Somewhere in the summer of my 16th or 17th year, I think the boss finally realized that I was simply better at other things, after years of what must have been charity on his part to keep me on. He could bang out a full sink of dishes in about three minutes. For me it took closer to 30, so while we generally never quite ran out, there was never an opportunity for me to do anything else. I just couldn't leave them dirty, not even a little bit. I found the concept of not doing a 100% job to be repulsive for some reason. I sometimes still do, and it does cause problems when I should have just stopped at 90% (or more like 30% with the dishes) -- perfectionism definitely has some drawbacks. I did much better as a cashier.
- tsotha 14y agoHah! That was me at McDonald's. One night everyone else was waiting impatiently in the dining room at 1:00 AM as I was furiously scrubbing pots sparkly clean. The team lead came over, observed my technique for a few minutes, sighed, and said "Most people just knock the worst of it off. We want to go home." They wouldn't let guys be cashiers, though, so it was making burgers and cleaning pots for a whole summer.
- shard 14y agoIs not letting guys be cashiers a corporate rule, or just in that particular McDonald's? What's the reasoning behind that?
- xenophanes 14y agoThere is a male cashier at my local McDonalds, so it can't be a universal rule today. I think it sounds more like a dumb quirk of one store than corporate policy.
- tsotha 14y agoYeah, I don't think it's corporate policy. I don't think it was corporate policy even decades ago when I worked there. Probably illegal now. When we complained about it the manager said "If you came here to buy a meal, who would you rather see?" As a teenage boy I couldn't argue with that logic.
- waterside81 14y agoFor more stories from the kitchen, perseverance, entrepreneurship and debauchery, I highly recommend Anthony Bourdain's book Kitchen Confidential. http://www.amazon.ca/Kitchen-Confidential-Anthony-Bourdain/dp/0747553556 http://www.amazon.ca/Kitchen-Confidential-Anthony-Bourdain/d...
- wpietri 14y agoYes, yes, yes. It contains this chunk of text that is perfectly applicable to coding: If you let your mise-en-place [your working area, your setup] run down, get dirty and disorganized, you'll quickly find yourself spinning in place and calling for backup. I worked with a chef who used to step behind the line to a dirty cook's station in the middle of the rush to explain why the offending cook was falling behind. He'd press his palm down on the cutting board, which was littered with peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, breadcrumbs, and the usual flotsam and jetsam that accumulates quickly on a station if not constantly wiped away with a moist side-towel. "You see this?" he'd inquire, raising his palm so that the cook could see the bits of dirt and scraps sticking to his chef's palm, "That's what the inside of your head looks like now. Work clean!" Any time I catch myself trying to rush through some piece of tricky coding, Bourdain's chef steps behind me and says, "Work clean!"
- anchorsteam 14y agoHe's right. Constantly redressing entropy keeps your mind free for the big picture once it's time to make hay.
- grownseed 14y agoThanks for this, had a good laugh reading it! Cooking is my other passion right next to programming and I've worked in kitchens quite a bit, an occasional plunger but mostly a chef, on-and-off since I was 14 (don't ask...). Haven't been back to chef-ing in about 5 years, but I miss it quite a lot for various reasons. It's taught me stuff about handling stress I don't think I could have learnt anywhere else, and making a bad situation fun is definitely a good place to start. I think the tech world lacks this sort of attitude drastically ; I also notice that a lot of people in our sector simply can't handle stress and high workloads very well. That might be part of the reason I did pretty well when I went back to programming. The problem with most jobs requiring a higher level of education (very generally speaking) is that they separate the maker of the product (or at least the person who delivers it) from the client. What it means is that there's rarely any direct feedback either way. Because of the shift in knowledge, you could deliver a sh*t product that your client will love, and vice-versa. In most cases, this wouldn't happen in a kitchen. You most likely wouldn't even be able to get through the first day without communication. Your work would be meaningless without feedback from your clients and your team (good and bad), chances are you wouldn't even have a job any longer. I'm not saying this doesn't apply to tech jobs, but there seems to be a certain latency in and "transformation" of the feedback that's passed around. It basically misses that social and professional rawness which I often miss :)
- Evbn 14y agoWhen has a dishwasher ever talked to a diner?
- namank 14y agoTLDR?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jonathanwallace 14y agoTo be successful in dishwashing at a restaurant, one must be organized, aggressive and proactive.
- anigbrowl 14y agoAuthor > you because he did a shitty job for one summer.
- jodrellblank 14y agoHard work builds character. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Work harder, and faster. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Don't sweat details that don't matter. It doesn't matter how hard you work if you aren't getting the work done. You don't get points for trying. Practising ambidextrous cutlery sorting increases proficiency at ambidextrous cutlery sorting ( http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1991/01/19 http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1991/01/19 ). So many common TLDRs of this story template.
- justinator 14y agoI love me a man with dishpan hands!
- nichols 14y agotl;dr: * You can often get things done faster by doing a half-assed job. * Robots have not advanced far enough to wash dishes yet.
- kintamanimatt 14y agoAs the article advises, don't be a weenie!
- namank 14y ago
- michaelochurch 14y ago[ETA: original title was "YOU'RE AN ANIMAL" (linkedin.com)] I was really fucking hoping to see a LinkedIn profile for somebody's dog or something.
- javanix 14y agoWell, yes, if you put 'Sex-Crazed' in the title of your blog entry I will read it. I won't feel great about it, but I'll read it.
- JDGM 14y agoIndeed. I felt a bit cheated by the end that the only appearance of this "sex-crazed" side was: "He sexually harassed waitresses using a long pair of tongs to increase his range. After drinks in the parking lot, he drove them around on his Ninja 1000." Then I thought about it some more and decided to give the writer the benefit of the doubt - he stresses the sex-crazed aspect of the cook to paint a clearer image of the type of person, even though it doesn't really come up in the story. Starting the article with that fact planted in my head even before the first paragraph probably made a big difference to my reading of it.
- csharpminor 14y agoLack of a sex-crazed mentor aside, I'd like to go on record to say that this was the most enjoyable 5 minutes I have ever spent on linkedin.
- user24 14y agodidn't even realise I was on linkedin.
- csharpminor 14y agoI managed to escape the site without being asked to "connect" with every single person I've ever contacted via gmail. Hooray!
- asveikau 14y agoThen when he used the dude's name... Well, I'll just say for that guy's sake I hope he changed it for the purposes of the story.
- deleted 14y ago
- d0c5 14y agoYou can't beat a good hard graft. Massive self esteem ensues after you SMASHED it @ work.
- beachstartup 14y agoworking out of the weeds is great because there is a two-sided battle being waged in your own mind the ENTIRE time the side that says "this is an impossible situation" and the side that says "you've done this a thousand times before, keep going."
- anigbrowl 14y agoa wider world where hardly anyone else had ever washed dishes for a living There's around half a million restaurants in the US, and turnover of kitchen staff is high, so I don't understand how he concludes this. Maybe he's talking about his social circle, but there's no shortage of people out there working hard at shit jobs. I can't say I care for this style of humblebrag.
- calinet6 14y agoHave you washed dishes for a living?
- anigbrowl 14y agoI have. I call it a shit job because it's very hard for not much pay. It's also repetitive and reactive, so once you've achieved competence, there isn't really anywhere you can go with it; it's up (to a better job in the kitchen) or out. I moved up to cooking, but I don't feel the same nostalgia as this writer for being a dishwasher. Of the various manual labor jobs I've done, I preferred construction work because it provides a sense of progress and offers more opportunities for skills development and variety as well as teamwork. YMMV.
- eitally 14y agoI suspect that the percentage of knowledge workers in Europe & the US/CA who have held menial jobs prior to entering the professional workforce is significantly higher than the percentages in developing countries. I could be way wrong, but it seems there's far less social stigma attached to holding service jobs in countries where everyone knows there are attainable, relatively straightforward to achieve, better options, compared to countries where the middle class is still much smaller and a large percentage of service workers know going in they'll be holding those types of jobs for life.
- amalag 14y agoYes in Asian cultures there is much more of a stigma with manual labor. It is a huge difference with western countries where work is valued no matter what it is.
- calinet6 14y agoReminds me of Thomas Keller's famous clock in the kitchen, with the words "Sense of Urgency" printed below. It hangs in the kitchens of all his restaurants. I try to remember it when I start to lose that sense of urgency, and it works well.
- Evbn 14y agoWhen I lose my sense of urgency, my mind unlocks and I can see the forest for the trees and solve big problems.
- codexon 14y agoWhat I learned from reading the Nth variation of this story: People love hearing about what a bad situation you were in before and how it leads to your success because you are more desperate than everyone else.
- kevinskii 14y agoAs a child I used to get rather irritated whenever my nanny or butler complained about their impoverished circumstances. People definitely love telling these stories. Hearing them, maybe not so much.
- krichman 14y agoWhat you may not have considered is that people like even less when someone complains about trivial problems during their wealthy upbringing. "Mother! The staff is whinging again!"
- ryanmolden 14y agoI'll assume your comedy detector is mis-calibrated, I have a hard time thinking someone could post here about the "tiresome whining of their servants" in anything but a joking manner.
- krichman 14y agoI surely hope so. It was such a derivation from the topic at hand (rags to riches vs. complaining servants) that, if it was satire or irony, I don't get what the joke or lesson was supposed to be. Edit: Perhaps the lesson it that they are tired of reading hard work your way to fortune stories? That does make sense, I was probably wrong in my comment above.
- codexon 14y agoI don't mean to put down any rags to riches people but if we were to believe the often repeated lessons, then we should be shipping ourselves to Africa in order to become the next billionaire. I smell survivorship bias.
- cududa 14y agoThis resonates particularly well with me. I've worked at 3 places in my life. The first was a summer camp, where I was often a dish washer. Being exposed to the skills of maintaining precision, order, and process under extreme stress is a massively valuable skill that you can cary through life. I'm just glad I learned it when the highest stakes were the lunch backup delaying dinner from being cooked - and not managing millions of dollars of investor's money. (Ironically my only place of employment between my company and that summer camp was at Microsoft, about 5 minutes away from the Red Robin mentioned in the post)
- pseut 14y agoNot to be (too) dismissive, but anyone can work a crap job for a summer in college. Have a shit full time job after college (hypothetically: file clerk at a nursing agency in in emeryville) -- that teaches you a different level of life lessons & desperation.
- kragen 14y agoThe thing about this entry, though, is that it tells you how he had to change in order to succeed at that job. Which is a job, by the way, that I failed at, for exactly the reason he was failing. I just didn't have the mentorship he did. Or maybe I did, but I didn't listen. I don't know, it's been a long time.
- joshrotenberg 14y agoI had a few high school dishwashing gigs myself. The rib house was the most memorable. Cleaning up BBQ sucked. I learned I never wanted to do that again.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- fgdsfgds 14y agoI really dislike this story. All I got from it was that this guy loves to stroke his own ego. WTF. The worst of it is that this story got so many points and that people are really lapping it up.
- foohbarbaz 14y agoWhen I was a teenager I worked in a kitchen. A few times. Worst. Thing. Ever. 20 hour day, 4 hours of sleep, then a day off (regular work). Then another shift, sometimes. Back breaking. Absolutely worst. Still wonder how people do that. Shudder. Had recurring nightmares for the next 20 years about being drafted again.
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- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- paulrademacher 14y agoFun story, but I'm gonna guess that the things he thought he learned on that job, he already had inside him. It was the first time he got to really apply his natural drive.
- nnq 14y agoI wonder why nobody found a way to completely automate the dish-washing process? Is it really that hard? Couldn't you have dish-type-customized trays and a "monster machine" you could load them into and get them out clean and dried? (This is one of the jobs I've really like to be made to disappear, viscerally, no matter how many people depend on this type of job. I've worked as a dishwasher myself but even as a young boy I realized I'm not gonna stand doing it, so I used all my cunning and reality-distorting abilities to get out of it to a better position in less than 3 days).
- bdunbar 14y agoThey do have those. I've used them. They're pretty cool: lots of steam flying around. But they are not cheap: my aunt couldn't afford one for her deli, for example, but she could afford me! But it's still going to be someone's job to load the thing up, and for manual intervention on pieces that can't be blasted, or need extra scraping.
- vl 14y agoThere are such machines. It's basically a really really large dishwasher with conveyer belt. Still, loading and unloading is a full time job.
- Spooky23 14y agoThat kind of equipment is expensive. Dishwashers, not so much. Many times, dishwashers are under the table workers anyway. In high school I was paid $10/hour in the 90's to unload wagons full of hay and stack them in a barn. There are machines that will bale, load, and stack hay. But they cost like $80k and require a modern tractor that costs $150k new. The farmers I worked for used a tractor from the mid-1950's, and didn't have enough land to generate the cash flow necessary to pay for the equipment. So they paid about $10-12k/summer for people to do the work manually.
- DelvarWorld 14y agothis is a boring article about an overworked dishwasher with no life lessons to gain and using 'sex' as a cheap title catch. skip it.
- eitally 14y agoBullshit -- plenty of people, especially technical folks or individuals working in IT more generally -- still haven't learned the lessons of hard work and problem solving + prioritization of tasks under pressure. Even if it's treacly, it's still worth hearing the same thing for the millionth time. I can tell you, for one, that I'll reshare this link in a place where my team might see it (especially for the benefit of the remote teams in Mexico, Brazil, and India, where programmers tend to come from upper-middle/upper class families anyway and may never have held a manual labor position in their lives).
- tomjen3 14y agoHmm, I am not sure his points really apply to programs given that it would be trivial to program if we knew exactly what the problem we were trying to solve was. Hard to prioritize when we don't know what is more important (relatively to the amount of time it takes), easy to prioritize when you have 10 different kinds of things to wash. And yes, I would fail as a dishwasher. That is why I am a programmer.
- epynonymous 14y agomost people are missing the point, it's not the dish washing or the food industry, it's these lessons learned: 1. create some type of order (clean env) in the chaos 2. coach 3. trust those that you hire old saying in chinese, leverage those you trust, dont leverage those you dont trust) 3. motivate/reward/acknowledge purely management, great!