In the essay drowning in dishes what is the ironic about the fact that danial first position in his new job is the dishwashing station?
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Answer:
The people who make a difference in your life come in all types. Some write on a chalkboard. Some wear a sports uniform. Some wear a suit and tie. For me, that person wore a tie with a Pizza Hut logo on it.
I started working at Pizza Hut in December 1989, when I was a freshman in high school. Parents in my small western Colorado town encouraged teenagers to work in the service industry after school and on weekends. It kept us out of trouble.
Having a job also kept me out of the house. I grew up mostly with my mother, and I never knew my biological father. My younger sister, younger brother and I went through a series of stepfathers. My relationship with those men was almost always fraught, and I was always looking for reasons to be away from home.
The Pizza Hut was old, and in the back it had three giant sinks instead of a dishwasher. One basin was for soapy water, one for rinsing and the other for sanitizing, using a tablet that made me cough when I dropped it into the hot water. All new employees started by washing dishes and busing tables. If they proved their mettle, they learned to make pizzas, cut and serve them on wooden paddles and take orders.
On my first night, the dishes piled up after the dinner rush: plates, silverware, cups and oily black deep-dish pans, which came clean only with a lot of soap and scrubbing in steaming-hot water. I couldn’t keep up, and stacks of dishes formed on all sides of me. Every time I made a dent in the pile, the call came back for help clearing tables out front, and I returned with brown tubs full of more dirty dishes.
At home, the chore I hated most was dishes. A few years earlier, my mother’s then boyfriend instilled a loathing of that task by making me scrub the Teflon off a cookie sheet, believing that it was grease, while he sat on the couch and smoked cigarettes. That boyfriend was gone, but another with a different set of problems had taken his place.
My shift was supposed to end at 9 p.m., but when I asked to leave, the manager, Jeff, shook his head. “Not until the work is done,” he said. “You leave a clean station.” I was angry and thought about quitting, but I scrubbed, rinsed and sanitized until after 10 that night.
I stayed on dish duty for weeks. My heart sank every time I arrived at work and saw my name written next to “dishes” on the position chart. I spent my shifts behind those steel sinks, being splashed with greasy water. After work, my red-and-white-checked button-up shirt and gray polyester pants smelled like onions, olives and oil. At home, I sometimes found green peppers in my socks. I hated every minute I spent on dish duty, and I wasn’t afraid to let everyone around me know it.
One slow midweek night, when I managed to catch up on dishes and clean out the sinks early, I asked Jeff when I could do something different. “Do you know why you’re still doing dishes?” he asked. “Because you keep complaining about it.” Nobody likes to work with a complainer, he said. But, he promised, if I continued to leave a clean station and not complain, next week he would put me on the “make table,” where pizzas were assembled before being put into the oven.
A few days later, when I reported for my after-school shift, I saw my name penciled not in the “dishes” box but in the “make table” box. I was ecstatic.
Jeff had a special way of running his restaurant. From a crop of teenagers, he assembled a team of employees who cared about their work — and one another. Most of my best friends from high school also worked at Pizza Hut, and some of my best memories were made under that red roof.