Dishwashing Days

One miserably hot summer day before my freshman year, I stayed home and read while Chelsea and Casey went out to check out the BYU campus. They came home, excited because Chelsea apparently got the three of us jobs at Legends Grille ("Where the champions eat!"). Casey and I were designated dishwashers. And Chelsea was tasked to watch the football players eat during their lunch in case they couldn't find the forks or ketchup.

And so began the 8 hour days of standing, loading, rinsing, sliding, unloading, and stacking on constant replay. The football players never stopped eating. I had never felt such intense emotions against a group of guys.

The emptiness inside my head threatened to fill my mind as I did dish after dish after dish after dish. 

But then Casey and I worked out a system. We did job rotations to stay alert. We sang songs and competed against each other. As kids who grew up with a maid, we did pretty well for ourselves. We challenged Chelsea to bring us the dishes down faster than we could wash them. We probably even broke the dishwasher union's record for amateurs.

I loved busing and collecting dishes outside because it seemed like a treat to be released from the kitchen. And it was fun being around the other freshman whom I would be a part of in a few weeks.

Then a guy sporting way too much gel stopped me one day because he wanted me to pass him the pepper on the table next to him. I accidentally grabbed the salt. He gave me one look then did an exaggerated demonstration, in super slow mo, with dragged out English to show me the difference by pouring both on the table and playing around with it. Then he asked me if I could understand him.

That's when it hit me: He thought I was stupid. That I couldn't speak his language. That I somehow was not at his level because I was holding a bus tray and washing dishes. I wanted to tell him about my upbringing, my scholarship, my English, my fancy stuff  . . . but instead I nodded slowly and walked back to the kitchen.

I think I cried while standing, loading, rinsing, sliding, unloading, and stacking that day.

Then I realized that I was very good at what I did. This coming from the spoiled girl who felt self-conscious with a broom in her hand at closing time on the first day of work because she's trying to remember what she learned about sweeping from movies. I was trying hard to do my best. And I would not let Mr. hair product and his few pinches of salt and pepper take away the pride I had in my job.

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This is why I love talking to the frontline workers at the factories. They file into the cafeterias, exhausted and emptied, past some of our staff who think that micro-credit is a fancy Western concept that doesn't matter because the working poor don't matter.

But sometimes, when I ask if I could sit next to them while they eat - and they smile shyly behind their bowls and chopsticks - they tell me things. Just rarely, I would share my dishwasher story. And then we smile because we understand what it is to dream of ingenious things even when our bodies are on constant replay.