Sunday in the Dishroom with Cecily

My Dear Reader,

As most of you already know, I work at the cafeteria of the Missionary Training Center as a dishroom supervisor. Once every three weeks, I am required to work on Sunday. Let me give you a taste of what that’s like.

Since I work for the Church, there is a sacrament service provided for employees to make up for the one we have to miss. I always forget what time it's at, and end up rushing to get there on time. This week I had to wake up my visiting teacher and beg her for a ride. Thankfully, she was more than happy to oblige. She's just one of those people who are awesome like that. I made it on time, thanks to her. The missionaries are assigned to take care of the meeting for us, and after the sacrament was passed, an Elder came to the pulpit and thanked all of us for sacrificing our Sunday to feed him. It was a really nice thing for him to do, I thought. I saw the same missionary a few hours later in the kitchen trying to help us push some heavy carts of dishes around, so I know that he really meant it. Most missionaries tend to be anti-jerks like that.

On other shifts where I supervise, I have the chance to get to know all of the people I work with, including their strengths and weaknesses. It is my job to make sure that each knows how to most effectively accomplish the eight or so tasks that need to be done throughout the shift, and I work very hard to make sure that I have a cohesive, competent crew by the end of the semester. On Sundays, however, my crew consists of a grab bag of people from all corners of the cafeteria, and since the turnover rate in food service is so high, this list of people is constantly changing. Another challenge I face is the fact that some of my co-workers interpret the fourth commandment to mean that they are justified in ditching work** on Sunday, so I really have no idea if four or fourteen people will show up. I've supervised on Sundays with both outcomes, and let me tell you that it's not fun to stand there with your clip board and wait for people to disappoint you. This week, however, everybody on my crew who hadn't recently quit came and I was feeling pretty lucky.

My duties as a dishroom supervisor are as follows: get there fifteen minutes early, turn on the giant monster of a dishwasher and ensure that it is working properly, turn on the monstrous beast that turns wasted food into compost and ensure that it is working properly, assign people jobs and ensure that they do their jobs properly, and do paperwork. On good days it's fairly simple. On bad days the dishwasher gets something stuck in it every five minutes, and as I stick my arm into its bowels to dislodge the obstruction, we drown in incoming dishes. There is really no way to tell which way a shift will turn out, even if you have a decent amount of people. I ended up with twelve, which was more than I had dared to hope for but less than ideal. The lunch shift went pretty well, and I spent the time hopping from person to person and helping each for about five minutes at a time. It was during this period that I tried to do something that I haven't attempted in almost three months--load glasses onto the machine. We put the glasses into a large, square container-things that are about three inches high, a foot and a half long and wide, and hold thirty-six glasses a piece. It gets pretty heavy, and I've been limited as to how much I can lift and how high I can lift it since my surgery. Despite all odds, I was able to prevail, which was quite a relief to the two people who do nothing else but put dirty glasses into those container-things, because they were running behind. We have two thousand missionaries in the MTC right now, and I swear that they use at least three to five glasses each, so you can guess that we have a lot of glasses to take care of. We finished later than I wanted to, but everything went according to plan, and I excused them to get the free meal we get on Sunday as a sort of apology.

I don't know why I continue to do this, but each Sunday I get so excited about the free food that I eat enough to make myself sick. And though I tried this week to break the habit, it was chicken cordon bleu day, and I just couldn't help myself. After a leisurely and gluttonous meal, I still had an hour until the second shift started, and I felt awful. Then I was assigned to clean up some rotting ketchup, and I felt worse. Once you become a dishroom supervisor, people tend to throw sickening jobs at you on a regular basis. In fact, I honestly think that whenever something really disgusting needs to be done, the management thinks, "Hmmm, is there a dishroom supervisor that I can get to take care of this?" I essentially had to take a half-gallon bag of ketchup out of the dispenser and clean up the mess. The bag had gotten a lot of air into it and become bloated to the point where it was stuck, so I had to stab it with a fork to get all of the nauseous gasses out of there. The bag also had a hole in the bottom, so I had to scoop all of the escaped ketchup by hand, wipe everything down, and put a new bag of not-rotting ketchup in. It took a half hour, most of which was spent doing the afore-mentioned scooping of rotting ketchup by hand. I was covered with it by the end, just in time for me to start supervising again. It was quite lovely. As I went back into the dishroom to set up again, I saw a large bucket of grease that had a layer of hardened lard on the top, meaning that it was my responsibility to scoop out that lard like I had the ketchup. I saved that for later.

The second meal went smoothly to start out, though people continued to get backed up throughout the shift. I did my best to help them, and I thought it was going fairly well. Then I left the dishroom for five minutes to do some paperwork and came back to find mountains of dirty trays and towers of dirty glasses stacked just about everywhere. When we get really, really, desperate, we just stack things up, and we were just about as desperate as we can get. There were literally seventy-six glasses-things stacked, which translates into exactly 2,736 unwashed glasses. At this same moment, my friends who work in other areas of the cafeteria came into the dishroom to find out where all of the glasses had gone. Apparently, we only have about 3,000 or so glasses in the entire cafeteria, most of which were stacked and dripping in the dishroom, and all of which were my responsibility. At this same moment, the dishwasher had several waterfalls gushing out of it, which meant that we had to stop everything and clean out the food that was stuck inside while the glasses continued to not be washed. That took too long as it was, but when we were finished, the dishwasher would not turn on again. Whose fault was it? Mine. But you would be impressed at how well I respond under pressure, such as the weight of 2,736 glasses, a mountain of trays, and a dishwasher that makes your home dishwasher look like a toothbrush. It got fixed eventually, thanks to the help of my crew, and we worked really hard to get all of the glasses and trays washed. I was physically and emotionally exhausted.

The miracle of it all is that not only did we get done, but we that we finished only fifteen minutes later than usual. I thought that we were at least forty-five minutes behind before I looked at the clock. By that time I was so happy to leave that I gave my crew a quick lecture on how to avoid this situation and dismissed them all. My ketchup-covered jeans were soaked up to my thighs, and my shoes and socks had standing water inside them, and as a squished my way into the dressing room to grab my things, I was lucky enough to hitch a ride. Walking the two miles home after you've spent all day up to your elbows in muck is just depressing. I came home ten hours after I had left, grateful that I have a bachelor's degree and will hopefully only be at the MTC for a few more weeks.

So, Gentle Reader, you now have a general idea what I do on Sundays in the dishroom. Despite everything, I've learned a lot about humility, service, and not being a jerk. I've also learned that I can do really hard and disgusting things, and that there are a lot of really hard and disgusting things that need to be done in this world. So let it be known that I, Cecily the Conqueror, can prevail against overwhelming odds and not-so-nice people, and I do so with the help of anti-jerks like that one missionary and my co-workers.

By the way, it wasn't until I was falling asleep that night that I remembered that I had completely forgotten about that bucket of lard. Oh, well.

Regards, best wishes, and anti-jerks,

-Cecily "The Conqueror" Jane

*This is a big deal if you happen to be Mormon and therefore believe in obeying all of the Ten Commandments, the fourth being that the Sabbath is a day for God and not work or entertainment. Mormons believe that going to work or spending money on Sunday is to be avoided whenever possible, and I am no exception. However, it turns out that missionaries still need to eat on Sunday, and that those missionaries' dishes still need to be washed on Sunday, and thus I have joined the ranks of Mormons who can't avoid working on the Lord's day, such as nurses, firefighters, cops, and those in retail sales. Do other Mormons raise their eyebrows at me? Of course they do. Believe it or not, some Mormons are jerks. Do some missionaries, the people I am sacrificing my day of rest to serve, look down on me for my service? Yes, though they are fairly rare. A very small number of Mormon missionaries are also jerks. I have met all of them. Fortunately, however, I am actually employed by the LDS church, and our prophet, President Thomas S. Monson, is very aware of what we do at the MTC. He even ate here on a Sunday not too long ago. So while I may not be saving lives, I consider myself to have the stamp of approval of the man who is God's mouthpiece to the world, and that's good enough for me.

**By the way, I hope that you truly appreciate the irony of being dishonest at work in order to please God. Madre and Padre took special care to teach me that skipping work when you have agreed to be there is amoral whatever the circumstances, and the more I work, the more I realize how right they were. I also see very clearly how this dishonesty affects others.