The 2nd job I ever had: Dishwasher at a seafood restaurant

When i was a kid my parents were of modest but adequate means. We never struggled for food or clothes but we wouldn't go out to eat very often - when we did it was considered a real treat. We had good food at home and mom to this day is one of the greatest cooks on Earth so even though we probably moaned about it at the time, we were actually getting much better food than they had at the fast-food restaurants anyway.

but if we wanted things like extra toys, candy, video games, or anything else, my parents were not going to get most of that for us. They encouraged us to work to make money and I have had a job since i was around 8 years old or so.

At this particular point in time the legal age for working a part time job was 15 and a half years of age and as soon as I was exactly that old I went and applied for a job where some of my friends worked at the Cap'N Sams seafood restaurant in New Bern.

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If that sign doesn't give you a good idea of how much of a sort of dump this place was, let me tell you: It was a dump. But for some reason or another it was quite popular both in the dining room and the bar area that was out front. Us teenagers manned the relatively massive dishwashing area against the wall and we had a lot of duties...we didn't just wash dishes.

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This is not the place in question but it looked something like that. People would drop things off on the left in plastic trays of sorts and then we would take the truly grimy stuff and soak them in the soaking sinks on the left or if the remnant food could be pressure washed off we would hit it with the hanging spray water into a catch trap sink that was constantly filled up with some of the worst-smelling mixtures you can imagine. Then it would head to it's most automated destination which was the industrial dishwashing machine in the corner.

Everything went on these very tough plastic trays that you could probably run over with a car and they would be just fine.

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These military grade trays were all the same size and they would roll into that corner machine for something like 1 minute and some sort of magic with powerful jets and more powerful chemicals would completely sanitize anything you put in there provided you got the muck off of it good enough before you put it in.

There was one downside to being the person who was manning the corner machine though and that was that the mostly ceramic dishes that would go into that machine would come back out at roughly the temperature of a piece of black painted steel that has been in the blazing sun all afternoon in the summer.

Your hands got pretty tough pretty fast because it was a different time man, they weren't going to give you gloves just because you had sensitive fingers. Plus, you needed to work very quickly because while the restaurant did have a lot of plates and glasses, sometimes the joint would be so busy that we needed to get these plates out very quickly. On a Friday or Saturday night, as well as every night during "Shrimp-Feast" there would be 4 of us teenage boys working back there. 1 to carry the plastic tubs back from where waiters and waitresses would drop them off, 1 person manning the sinks, one person manning the corner machine and 1 person re-racking all the clean dishes and cups.

Our job didn't end there though. We were always the last people to leave the place at the end of the night because being the lowest ranking people on the totem pole, we had to sweep and mop the entire kitchen after everyone else was done giving us all the stuff they used to cook with all night. We also had to scrub the steamer and also filter the deep fry oil through these gigantic coffee filter sorts of things to get all the blackened pieces of stray butterflied shrimps out of there.

That part of the job is amazing to me that a 16 year old was allowed to do it completely unsupervised. Here we have this giant and heavy vat of definitely going to hospitalize you and maybe kill you hot container of oil and you have to carefully lift it through a filter while not spilling any of it on yourself. If someone were to have a slip of the hand and spill that entire thing on them, kiss your leg skin goodbye! This never happened though because I guess we were just built different back then.

It was a pretty tough job but I didn't care because I was working with my friends so the time just kind of flew by. I was getting paid a whopping $4.25 an hour in those days as that was the minimum wage at the time. We were only legally allowed to work 20 hours a week back then. These days you probably aren't allowed to do it at all because it seems like everything even remotely dangerous is illegal now.

We got cut and burned plenty. We also would get extremely dirty from all the slop we were dealing with. One day one of our crew got put on oyster shucking detail and cut the absolute hell out of his hand and had to go to the hospital. It was on that day that I found out that oyster shucking knives are very very sharp.

So at the end of a week after taxes I would probably get like $75. This doesn't seem like a lot but it was for a high school freshman like me especially since most of my friends didn't have any money at all.

I remember the intense stink of my clothes after a night of working at CapNSams and so does my mom who started to request that I remove my clothes immediately after arriving home but a lot of the time I would get home after everyone else in the house was asleep.

It was a good learning period for me because on those days there wasn't anyone that was going to force me to go to sleep but if I didn't, school would be really tough the next day.

I think that a kid having a job is a good thing. I was instilled with a sense of responsibility at a very young age. I learned that things are not free and you have to work for them. You also learned to be a bit frugal when buying things because you are able to look at the cost as "hours of handling dirty and very hot dishes" rather than just the dollar amount.

I'm glad I did it, even though it was really dirty work.