I’ve had a handful of jobs in my lifetime. I’ve detasseled corn, washed dishes, cooked food, sold insurance, ministered to coaches and athletes, and done taxes. I’ve had favorite things in those jobs and dreadful things in those jobs. Sometimes, the job itself was nothing but dreadful. Detasseling corn was definitely not a favorite job of mine, but it only lasted two to three weeks and it was over.

And we got paid what seemed like a lot of money in that two-week span. Looking back, it wasn’t very much money at all, but to a high school kid who has everything taken care of for him by his parents, the extra cash seemed like a lot at the time. The worst job I think I had to work was washing dishes at a local restaurant. It was a summer job and I always had to work in the evening when all the fun was going on outside of work. It wasn’t just washing dishes that was bad, it was the fact that when the restaurant closed for the night, everyone except the dish washers got to leave. The reason being was because the restaurant had a buffet. Every single buffet pan needed washed before I was allowed to leave.

These pans had food completely caked and burned on them, so it took forever to get that stuff to come off. Not to mention, we had to break down all the shipping boxes that the restaurant supplies and products would come in. Why this responsibility fell on the dishwashers was completely unbeknownst to me because of how busy we were. The waitresses were so bored they’d just hang out in the kitchen and eat.

Why couldn’t they have broken down shipping boxes? All they cared about was getting to play with the supplies like popping the bubble wrap that would come in the cardboard boxes. And to be honest, that would upset me to some extent.

But, looking back, we couldn’t even get them to scrape the food off the plates they brought us. Instead, they just sat all the dishes down on our runway with all the food in the world piled high. A true breeding ground for flies and gnats alike. Therefore, it doesn’t surprise me that they couldn’t break down boxes when they were incapable of scraping a little food off the plates they had just sat down for us to clean.