Okay, so not having internet at home makes posting regularly, or even posting irregularly, difficult. But here it is- today I'll talk about the dish room.
How shall I put it? The dish room is the source of humor and grief for most DC workers. You cannot have a DC without a dish room. When ceramics and silverware are used to serve over a thousand peopl, you better hope that there's some place to clean and sterilize them. There have been odd instances when the dish machine (the thing that cleans and sterilizes) broke, in various DCs. That would temporarily qualify the place as a DC without a dishroom, sort of. But those various instances have not been pleasant. I think I remember someone telling me about how some of the dishes had to be carted over to the other DC to clean up afterwards.
During my time there nothing so eventful have happened. We had this instance where the dish return (a series of racks with conveyer belt, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about) broke and people had to come in and fix it. I think that was either my first or second day as the "dish captain" (a title assigned to the one person whose shift in the dishroom started the earliest, and the person is in charge of (sort of) over seeing things and making sure everyone got their breaks). Then there was the other time when the room flooded (by no means a rare occurance, actually, since the room seemed to be decidedly hydrophillic), and I had to unload very hot dishes next to guys who were trying to fix the plumbing. That was interesting. The dishes were hot.
Which brings up the other unforgettable point of very hot dishes. I heard that we used to have thick, sort of heat proof gloves, but no one ever found out what happened to them and new ones never arrived. (I've heard it brought up in job training, and I've heard it brought up in front of management, yet no new ones have materialized even up till the day I left.) As far as I know people are still wearing the regular sheet-o-plastic gloves - one on top of the other, for several layers. Except you still loose the feelings in your fingers in the end, after the pain goes away. This is why the dish captain usually switches the people around so no one got stuck unloading burning hot dishes (oh, for clarification, the heat's from the machine: sterilization to kill germs, I think) from the dish machine. Except there were a few people who were very good at it and who got used to it (and consequently probably lost all nerve endings in their finger tips) who preferred to work there. In which case you mostly leave them alone because they ARE good at it. Speed is essential when the dirty dishes are coming in by the hundreds (no joke here).
But the dish room is humor too. The radio is always on. You may not always be able to hear it over the clatter but it's always on. I never knew any of the stations but that's to be expected and had nothing to do with the fact that I was in Davis. Mike is, I think, one of the few people who can actually not only make out what songs are playing, but sing along with most of them. Dish room is playing build-a-city with mug-crates and plates and cracking jokes that were loud by default because - well, dish room. Dish room is Mike blowing up an empty plastic bag (the sort that lines large milk cartons, as in the really large ones that you get in cafeterias) and sealing it, and then sending it through the dish machine again and again to see when it'll pop. It got to the point where every few seconds everyone'd crane their necks to see whether or not the square balloon of plastic will emerge from the other end, steaming, glistening, and triumphant but alas, the plastic was no match for the machine and it eventually popped, forcing us to seek other means of amusement.
My that was a long sentence.
Dish room is cleaning up after people and seeing after the details sometimes, going into each station (kitchenettes, don't hold me up on the spelling if you can guess what word I'm trying to spell) to see if there's any dirty dish that needs to be picked up, or if they needed any clean dishes or silverware. Dish room is looking for brooms and detergents and someone who actually knew what all those buttons all over the walls and sides of machines were for, and which one was to turn something off. Dish room is being repeatedly sprayed (I've started calling it "being baptized by the dishroom") while the people are spraying the machine down after the day's done (and darkness has fallen, off of the wings of night, har). It's rather hard to remain pristine after working there, and showering afterwards is more or less a necessity.
In other words, working in the dishroom is hot, wet, and hard. The only people I've ever heard who wanted to work in the dishroom were mostly shift leaders, so they can avoid talking to people. In other words, working in the dish room is jokes and radio. In other words, one of my fellow worker had put it: you have not really worked in the DC until you've covered either the pot room or the dish room.
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