Work trumps quirk in the restaurant

Ah, the foodservice industry: Where one’s background doesn’t mean much if the works gets handled smoothly and efficiently.

If your hobby is taking old appliances and turning them into killer robots, there is a place for you in the foodservice industry. Don’t send your resume to me, please—I’m not hiring and I already have my killer-robot guy—but the industry is broad, tolerant and inclusive, and can always find a use for a set of skills.

I was working in a failing restaurant once when my dishwasher called me into his cramped, unventilated little kingdom to discuss sanitizer. He was in his early 60s and had been, he claimed, a chemical engineer for Boeing in Seattle before depression forced him into early retirement. “So Jon,” he said, “read me the name of the chemical in that bucket of sanitizer hooked to the dish machine.”

“Sodium Hypochlorite.”

“Uh huh. Now read me the name of the chemical in this.” He held up a bottle of Hi-Lex.

“Sodium Hypochlorite.”

“Yup. Now you know and I know that this restaurant is going down the tubes. So, if you give me five bucks a week, I’ll make sure that bucket stays full and you won’t have to pay Ecolab $50 to refill it. When they ask why we don’t run out, I’ll tell them it’s been slow.”
I sighed. “Dean, there’s a little counter on the side that shows how many racks you push through. They know how much chemical gets used.”

He looked innocent. “But the counter doesn’t work anymore. I checked.” Then he smiled, and said, “If I thought we’d be in business any length of time, I’d be more subtle. My dad had a truck stop and he showed me how to take out the gear that turns the counter and file off every other tooth.”

I never quite knew what to make of this guy. He also claimed to have been a commando in Korea, and his war stories were entertaining and fascinating: Once on a reconnaissance north of the Yalu River, he went out to the latrine side of camp and was quietly squatting when a sniper put a bullet between his feet. He ran to his tent pulling his pants up and was grabbing his rifle when his sergeant asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. Gonna shoot that damn sniper, he replied. Great, said the sergeant. This guy is a real fine shot, and he’s been on us for days and just wants to have fun. Shoot him and they’ll replace him with someone like you who can’t take a joke, and where will you poop then?

What a mouth. There were a fair number of yarns like this, and they were all cohesive and believable, which makes an inveterate liar like me suspicious. He was, however, a hell of a worker and kept everyone smiling, and everyone knows that looking in the mouth makes your gift hoarse, or something.

And this is a thing I love about the business more than free beer (an endangered entitlement nowadays): the ability to tolerate all sorts of foibles in the name of competence. Another gent I worked with was the illiterate son of chronic alcoholic parents, and he could make any machine in the restaurant purr when he walked near it. He’d sit over the engine of a buffalo chopper with a tweezers and a toothpick, tell it soothing stories and make it happy to pulverize onions again (“You know, honey, it was a great day for me when I was thirteen and people first started using those U-shaped locks on their bikes. Instead of a bolt cutter, now all I had to carry was a hairpin.” Machine humor? I’ll never know). As a cook, he was just a bit more than decent; as a colleague, he was tremendous: good with people, kind to appliances. Another gent who clearly had a place.

It’s odd when you’re on the line and the schedule hasn’t been posted and you realize that you are hoping that the crazy Neanderthal jerk will be coming in at five and not your good buddy who is in the weeds with three tickets. We all have quirks, some minor, some extreme, but at eight o’clock on a Saturday night, only a couple of things get noticed. Afterwards we can worry about haberdashery and pedigree; within the walls of the restaurant, work trumps quirk in anyone’s judgement.