The headline in an upvalley newspaper caught my eye. It said, “Students, now’s the time to secure a summer job.” Great idea, and here is a great summer job for teens: washing dishes in local restaurants. Dishwashing is a quickly learned skill that can follow teens for a lifetime if they need a job fast.
Washing dishes was my retirement job at the Aspen Skiing Company (SkiCo) for two winters a while back and I know a bit about it. Dish Detergent Manufacturers
What’s so great about working as a dishwasher (aka “pearl diver”)? For starters, in the Roaring Fork Valley, the pay is good and gets better as you move upvalley. On the functional side, for me, time moved pretty quickly through the day, which was better than factory jobs I had where the only diversion was looking at the clock every five minutes.
Here are two crucial tips for rookie dishwashers. First, most folks don’t know that dishwashers can turn deadly to co-workers. How? Let’s say you, the pearl diver, have a sharp butcher’s knife in your right hand and must transport it from point A to point B. Do you go charging across the kitchen with your arm cocked at a 45 degree angle at your waist, as if you were out to plunge it into a co-worker’s stomach? No. You do two things. You hold the knife straight down by your side, so its nose is pointed at the floor, and say, in a loud voice, “knife” as you leave the dish pit and any time you round a corner or enter another room. (I learned this tip after a few days from the senior dishwasher at the Merry Go Round at Aspen Highlands.)
Second tip: Wash the easiest pots, pans, plates and what-nots first. A tall, thin, Ethiopian at the Merry-Go-Round taught me this one.
Everyone agrees the Merry-Go-Round dish pit layout is nuts. When I was there four winter’s ago, the only way from the kitchen to the front of the house was a 20-foot straight shot through the bowling-lane-like dish pit. The dish pit itself was less than 10 feet wide, so it often became congested with servers, kitchen staff and the occasional SkiCo supervisor. Toward the end of the day, as pots and pans came swarming in from the kitchen end, servers pushed overflowing carts of dirty dishes into the dish pit from the front of the house. Talk about a bottleneck. The senior pearl diver sometimes shouted, “No!” at the beleaguered servers as they struggled to push their way in.
The action for me got tense as 4pm approached. The Merry-Go-Round is located midway up the mountain. I don’t ski, so if I was late for the nearby chairlift, I had to wait to get schlepped down the mountain in the back of the Cloud Nine restaurant supply cat. The beast clanged like an army tank and rode like one.
Wrapping up, dishwashing is a skill that can be functionally learned in one-to-five days depending on your attitude and willingness to learn, although for me to become a really good dishwasher would have taken at least another year or two.
Dishwashers are usually in demand just about everywhere, so if you want to pick up and leave, there you go, which brings us to Dishwasher Pete. Pete’s goal was to dishwash in all 50 states. He only made it to about 35, but that didn’t stop him from writing a book about his adventures. The book is “Dishwasher” by Pete Jordan, which was published by Harper Perennial. The San Francisco Bay Guardian called it “an instant classic.”
Jordan said of his book, “For 12 years, I was the most prolific dishwasher of them all. From 1989 to 2001, I dished my way around the country, unwittingly searching for direction … From a bagel joint in New Mexico … a dinner train in Rhode Island … to a crusty hippie commune, I washed the nation’s dishes.”
Pete is known to some for bluffing his way to the David Letterman TV show green room once, and being invited back once. (Long story short, Pete didn’t want to appear on the show but his friend did, so his friend pretended to be him). Pete’s Letterman adventure was recounted on NPR’s “This American Life” with Ira Glass.
Pete moved with his wife to Amsterdam in 2002 and began a new life as a bicycle mechanic and writer. So there ya go. A lowly dishwasher one day, a published author the next. And it all started for Pete when he landed his first job in a dish pit.
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