Why Washing Dishes Is The Best Job You'll Ever Get

Dishwashing is hard, unpleasant work.
What's more, if you are a dishwasher, you are the only person who works entirely by themselves. You are the odd one out, with your stiff plastic apron, flecked with foam and pieces of food, sweating, pushing your damp hair out of your eyes and with no one to share the discomfort. Whereas a waiter has fellow waiters to chat to when there is no work to do.
(When you are a dishwasher, there is never no work to do).

What's more:
- Your area is the last area of the kitchen to be renovated and have the outdated or broken equipment replaced.
- You are paid less than some of the front of house or waiting staff, who only have to swan around with nice manners serving food and taking orders to earn their bread.
Whereas you must bend, lift, sweep, wipe, carry, and above all, scrub. Whereas you must battle with your instinct to take off the bloody apron and go and sit down somewhere with a hot beverage (and possibly never come back) every minute if not every second.

When you are a dishwasher, it is easy to feel sorry for yourself. Too sorry for yourself. Remind yourself: Not all of us are lucky enough to have jobs. Not all of us are lucky enough to live in countries where there is a set minimum wage. Be grateful for your $12.50 an hour. Not all of us work in places where we get fed.

(If you are a dishwasher, and you do not get fed at work, complain or quit. That shit is way out of line.)


Don't say dishwasher. Don't say dishie. Kitchen hand is what you should call yourself. Remind yourself: I am a kitchen hand. I am handy in the kitchen. I am useful. If I do not do my job, this place can not do business. I am essential, I am the central cog in the machine that keeps everyone else running. Deep down, people appreciate how useful I am, even though this may not be reflected in my wages or work environment.

Remind yourself:
When you wash dishes, your thoughts are your own. Treasure this. Any better-paid, better-respected position requires leasing not only your body but your soul.
That shit will kill you.
When you wash dishes, it is possible to reach a Zen-like state of detachment when all your movements are automated and your mind floats off to an altogether more pleasant location. You cannot do this if you are a waiter, or a chef, or the restaurant owner. When you wash dishes, you can think of art, music, love, hope, the end of the world, God, death, the future.
I admit that when I wash dishes, I tend to think a lot about dish washing.

The more pot you smoke, the easier this job becomes. This is a fact. It enhances the detachment/automation thing. It makes you care less. This is a good thing. The more you care about stuff, the angrier you will become. This applies not just to dishwashing, but to life; perhaps the former could be said to be a microcosm of the latter.

Dishwashing is easy. It involves next to no investment on your part in terms of
a) giving a shit
and b) bothering to learn anything new.
Treasure this also. The next job you have, if it is not another dishwashing one, will require you to focus, at most if not all times, and it will require you to at least pretend to care about something, and it may require you to learn difficult stuff. You may not even be paid for learning the difficult stuff. It may need to happen in your own time. You may even need to attend courses, which you may even have to pay for, possibly necessitating a student loan which will hang over your head and suck up your income for a large chunk of your life.

That shit is lame. Keep washing dishes.

Another thing:
Being a kitchen hand is obviously not a permanent state of affairs, not a career, and thus it gives you ample room to fantasise about your untapped potential. You are obviously capable of much more than washing dishes. In a better-paid, better-respected position, you may realise that in fact the extent of your talents was not quite as wide as you thought it was.

So long as you wash dishes, you can pretend that the next job you get is going to be better.