My First Job Experience! Mon, Jun 22, 2020

Mary Callender’s was definitely my first real job experience, and it was quite the experience! I started as a dishwasher, and man that was brutal. The first 2-weeks were rough. I didn’t think I was going to last and wanted to quit 3 days in. It was gross as I had to touch soggy half eaten food all the time. My hands hurt from the hot water and my feet hurt because I was standing for 7-8 hours straight. Not a lot of people know this, but dish washing for a big chain restaurant can be stressful. The restaurant constantly needed clean plates and pans as they only had so much, so I was never able to stop. If they ran out of clean dishes, they would come and pressure you to get them out faster. Other than washing dishes, I was also responsible for other miscellaneous tasks like preparing soups and baking cornbread when the restaurant ran out of them, which it was often. I was always on GO! GO! Mode as soon as I clocked in. The servers would pop their heads in at the back of the house and scream “We are out of cornbread!”, and I had to stop washing dishes to go prep and bake the cornbread. I had to do those other tasks as fast as possible as the longer I took to do other things, the more dirty dishes accumulated on my side. Because I was always in a rush, I ended up burning myself several times either with the oven or the boiling soup. Luckily for me, they promoted me and took me out of dish washing duties after 2-months. 

It was definitely not an easy first job, but now that I look back at it, I’m very glad I went through that experience. It made me appreciate the hard work my parents did when I was little as they had similar jobs back then. It also gave me an even bigger incentive to finish my college education when things got difficult, as I told myself I would never do that job again. Most importantly, it makes me appreciate and be thankful for the jobs that I’ve had since I graduated from college. I often forget, but my dish washing experience ended up shaping my life in a very positive way, and I’m very grateful for that.