I graduated from architecture school with the rest of my friends, but while they started jobs at various firms on the east coast, I headed west. My best friend, Will, had landed a job as at a ski resort in Colorado and promised me a job at the resort if I joined him. When I arrived, I filled out an application and was offered work as a housekeeper or a dishwasher. I chose the latter.
While it wasn’t a prestigious line of work given my hard earned college degree, it was a source of income, and I got free ski passes for the season at one of Colorado’s best resorts. This was to be a precursor of my future lifestyle.
I was assigned to the dishwashing room in the convention center for Keystone resort. This was a dining facility that could serve up to 2000 people in one sitting. While I’d had experience as a dishwasher a smaller venues, this was something on a scale I’d never seen. My first night was a disaster. It was nothing that I’d done wrong. It’s just that there was no organization to any of the dish crates that lined the wall opposite the dishwashing area.
When the servers came back to get clean glasses, they had to search through rows of stacks several feet high to find the correct glass. The dirty dishes were so backed up that they’d set up tables outside the dishwashing room where the servers could dump the overflow. We would not get to these until the end of the night.
Constantly we were being asked when clean plates or glasses would be available. It was an outstanding opportunity to see the dishroom operating at its worst while serving hundreds of people. To make things worse, we were called out of the dishroom on occasion to help stage the plates that were headed into the main dining hall.
As you can imagine, when you’re serving a couple thousand people, it’s a challenge to get the food plated, presented and served before it gets cold. An assembly line was set up along a long metal table, and each person was responsible for a part of the presentation. Some added a couple slices of turkey, others a dollop of mashed potatoes, others a garnish, and at the end of the table, before the plate was put on a serving tray, there was someone with a cloth to wipe up any gravy that had spilled over the edge of the plate. It was a staggering procedure that allowed all of the people in the dining hall to be served almost simultaneously.
When all the food had been sent out, we returned to the dishroom, where not a single bit of counter space could be seen beneath the pile of soiled dishware. I saw all I needed to prevent this from happening again. The next day I came in early and spent the first hour of my shift sorting all of the glasses and plates into like stacks. Obviously, all of drinking glasses should be in their own row and all the wine glasses in their own row.
Once I did that, I switched places with one of the other dishwashers. He had been working at the convention center for a long time, and while he had no sense of order, he had hands that were so calloused that he could pick up the dishes straight out of the machine without needing gloves. I, on the hand, could manage all the incoming dishes, keeping like dishware together and handling the cool dishes on their way to the dishwasher.
I met with the head waiter at the beginning of his shift, and he told me about setting up the back-up tables outside the dishroom. I agreed to this but asked that he tell the servers to only use them if the dishroom got backed up. I also asked that he instruct the servers not to mix different types of glasses together in the same crates. We agreed to give each others suggestions a try.
The wave of dishes began rolling in, and though there were only two of us on the line instead of three, we managed to keep pace with everything dropped on us. I stood at the head of the dishwashing line answering the servers questions as to where to find clean ice cream goblets or where to place dirty fondue pots. The night passed quickly, and we looked like a couple of jugglers throwing pots back and forth between each other. When it finally slowed down, I went into the hall to see how many dishes we had left to do and was surprised to see there was not a single one on either of the tables outside the door.
I thanked the head waiter for keeping up his end of the bargain, and he thanked me by saying “in all the years I’ve worked there, I’ve never seen that table stay empty the whole evening”. We’d done such a good job re-stocking the dishes once they were cleaned that there was no need for me to come in early the next day to prep all the stacks for that evening.
When I did come into work, I was called to my boss’s office. He handed me an envelope, and said it was a gift from all the waiters. When I opened it, I was shocked to see a gift certificate for two people to the finest restaurant at the resort. After a humble thanks, I asked if it would be okay if I invited my best friend who got me the job. He said, “of course”, so the following week, Will and I dressed up in the best clothes we could scrounge up and enjoyed a multi course dinner overlooking the Rocky mountains.
As the winter continued on, I had to find other things to occupy my time at work now that dishwashing wasn’t consuming all my hours. One day, I grabbed all the pots from the hanging racks above the cook stoves, took them to the dishroom and scoured them all until they looked like new.
Another day, I got up above the stove and began to clean all of the grease from the ventilation ducts. All the while I continued to run the dishroom like a swiss clock. It didn’t go without notice. One day the conference center manager called me in and asked me what my plans were for the summer. I told him that Will and I planned to leave for California in the spring. He said, “I’ll pay you thirty thousand a year to stay.” Thirty thousand a year to be a dishwasher! That was a higher starting salary than any of my former classmates were making as architects.
I admit, it pained me to say no, but nothing could compete with California and that rolling Pacific Ocean I hadn’t seen in 3 years. I was a coast kid and to the coast I would return. To this day, my favorite job is washing dishes. It’s a job where no one bothers you as they don’t want to get stuck helping out. You’re your own boss, and while it is possible to do it without much exertion, with a little effort, it’s possible to turn it into a lucrative career that also allows you to ski for free on the continental divide.