Notes on (Professionally) Washing Dishes

Shawn goes solo on the quiet contentment of dishwashing, coworker music, and some other things.

Aside from one line in a post about 101 things I enjoyed last year on my personal site, I never really said publicly that I was laid off in October. It was abrupt, clinical, and routine, as these things go. It was a Monday morning. The head of HR wrote “Hi Sean” in a Slack message asking if I planned to join a surprise mandatory meeting that had started 10 minutes ago, while I was busy getting ready for the day. The job was always challenging to explain over the holidays: effectively a polling firm, but not trafficking in political horse race fare like presidential approval ratings. It was media-adjacent, but not really a media company — the data we collected was of journalistic value but also serviced some of the largest companies in the world.

The primary draw of not posting about my troubles was a naive hope that they’d work themselves out quickly, and I’d skirt by with pride intact as if no real disruption occurred. The secondary, and more realistic draw, was avoiding the well-intentioned if functionally useless “you’d be a fool not to snatch this guy up in an instant!!” quote-tweets from a few nice friends and acquaintances still chugging away in an industry that isn’t really my own. I don’t know if anyone’s ever gotten a job from those posts, much like I don’t know if anyone’s gotten a job from applying the old-fashioned way in the last eight months.

I applied to 76 content marketing/digital marketing/communications/copywriter jobs before I stopped keeping track in mid-March. Six of these led to early screener interviews, three or four advanced to the final stages, none resulted in an offer. One of them drew nearly 400 applicants. Unemployment was basically exhausted by this point, so I decided to end my halcyon days as a professional movie watcher to become a professional dishwasher at a newly opened bakery wholesale space.

I’ve always been the dishwashing guy everywhere I’ve lived as an adult, but never done it professionally. When I interviewed for this job, I also expressed interest in baking, since I “got into baking during the pandemic,” at which point the manager very politely said something along the lines of (heavily paraphrasing): “that’s nice, but it’s a whole different ball game in there.” She was right, and the same could be said for dishwashing in a three bin sink. The one-at-a-time, leisurely pace of home washing, the hot-but-not-scalding water of home washing; that isn’t how it works here.

There was a certain resignation to taking this job — that’s really it, the best you could do after six months? And then, the internalized snobbery that a lot of service workers and ex-service workers have about dishwashing. At least from past jobs I’d worked, this was bottom of the totem pole stuff — not quite trusted enough to be touching food on the line, and certainly not trusted enough to be talking to any civilians out on the floor. I got over it pretty quickly, in part because this job paid fairly well for dishwashing, and came with the added benefits of so much free bread product, along with privacy and relative seclusion. There were no customers to create unpredictable demand or rushes in workload, just the six or so bakers in the open-air kitchen. And even in a kitchen without diners, dishwashers are an integral part of the operation. You can’t continue cooking or baking a product, unless the last dishes you used are clean again — and no one has time to be doing that while they ought to be kneading, scooping, or mixing, right? And unlike polling or market research, everyone you might talk to knows what dishwashing is. (Nevermind if you might over-inflate the responsibilities beyond dishwashing in conversation for your own pride.)

On the first day, you wash things somewhat methodically and without latex gloves. The sheet trays and mixer bowls build up, as do the jagged hang nails. The skin bordering the right side of your thumbnail suddenly whittles away, after just a day or two of slashing steel wool along the edges of a few dozen baking sheets, with each jagged piece of metal or charred pastry chunk nipping at your hands. After a while, it seems like you might not ever have to clip your fingernails again, as they naturally file down through this process. It’s not unlike this nail scratchboard we’ve trained the dog on to sand down her nails.

For the first week or two, you’re learning the ropes and are decidedly average at the job — though some claim you’re better than the other dishwasher by default, who looks like Abe Vigoda and leaves an oily film on every dish in the place — and then at a certain point, you get good at it. There’s a therapeutic rhythm to squirting soap on a sheet tray, sliding steel wool along the edges, then the center, then the back, hosing it down in the empty bin, and then dunking it in the clean sanitized water. Again and again and again.

It has a way of reorienting your approach to movement and prioritizing life at home. I find an added purpose and quickness to basic tasks — showers weren’t places to relax, but an opportunity to make your body a dish, sudsing, scrubbing, and rinsing with heightened pressure and speed. Sometimes, I’d move about the house like Day 1 Jeanne Dielman, every routine and chore something that can be finished with conviction and precision. Not quite speedrunning life, but it initially added a newfound urgency to everything that wasn’t work.

There’s never been a more tangible, physically structured approach to time management than washing dishes for a business without a machine. You have the stacks accumulating, all day, without interruption, you have the sinks, and you have a four-shelf drying rack, taller than your head. The sequencing is everything: start piling dishes on the top shelves when they’re finished, working down to the lower shelves, so the driest dishes don’t get cascading drops from the fresher, wetter bins and pans placed above them. Since the sinks take an unspeakably long time to refill with clean water, time out your drying of dishes as they fill up — and time out your (countless) bathroom trips, due to all the running water, with the shelves being full for drying. And perhaps most crucially, you’ve gotta take care of the things you least want to address first, whether it’s 10 huge muffin sheets, or the mixer base that feels too heavy to support with one hand but you try it anyway. 

Did I mention you’re away from the computer all day? The days move fast, with the steady, constant, but not quite overwhelming flow of things to wash. This means time to empty the mind, or open the mind, as you see fit — at home, I spend almost zero minutes in this headspace. Gone are the opportunities to get subsumed in whatever dumb bullshit people are talking about online in a given day. What’s that, something about media parties? Can’t hear you over the sound of blazing hot water pummeling these pans and my fingertips. Not that I really ever felt fully integrated into the media world or “music Twitter” during any of my staff jobs remotely writing, but I’ve never felt further removed from it. And yet, it feels like a rare opportunity to unlock and brainstorm some ideas, like the ones you’re reading right here.

But you also miss phone. You get little dispatches during those frequent bathroom trips, these contextless flashes into a world you’d be staring at for much of the day during regular times. There’s the Mets dropping 16 runs on the Braves — are they good? There’s your friend on a stream with the Needle Drop, let’s check it out for 20 seconds. Would you look at that, O.J. Simpson died five minutes ago. Now you possess the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to break the news to a few people who definitely don’t know O.J. Simpson is dead.

About those people: nobody really talks to you much, unless spoken to, and there’s just a couple who help you out with drying and clearing the rack. That’s okay, we stand at slightly different ends of this big open room. More time for listening to literally everything around you, and most of that entails music coming out of a tiny JBL bluetooth speaker. People were talking about “coworker music” earlier this year, and boy I can tell you now: it isn’t quite Turnstile and Khruangbin. Besides the one cool person who tossed on Keep It Like a Secret and Loveless in full during an early shift, some of the other selections range from stuff you’ve never heard before (neutral), stuff you’ve never heard before (bad), musical numbers, and “Paper Planes” on a near-daily basis. There’s one person who leans heavy on the Hot Chelle Rae, Panic! At the Disco, and what I could only describe as ex-Disney pop stars who didn’t take with the public. The stickiest melody of this bunch, I came to find after having the refrain stuck in my head for weeks, belonged to an artist named Hoku (she did the “Perfect Day” song) and a song called “Another Dumb Blonde” (appeared on the Snow Day soundtrack). This same coworker had also never listened to a Beyoncé album in full before playing Cowboy Carter at work one day. (Her verdict: extremely mixed, wished there were more covers.) Multitudes! There seemed to be a light stigma against wearing headphones, since past dishwashers would wear them and bang the sheet trays too loudly, so you abstain while other people are around, despite the opportunity to catch up on so much new material.

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Uh oh, the guy who helped you the most with drying dishes and resetting the stacks is walking back to the group a little misty-eyed. You’ve been here for a month and a half. He’s just been canned, and reports trickle in of other, long-tenured managers at the other location getting the boot too. There were indications of financial stress leading up to this — reduced health benefits, caginess about full-time versus part-time hour availability — but it’s suggested that everyone who survived this blitz is safe, for now. Still, you surprise yourself by how quickly you process what’s happened and put your guard up, knowing that it isn’t over until the whole staff gets an email of reassurance.

The weekend following this is slower, as the output seizes a bit during the summer. You still breeze through the workload, as your coworkers bond over the biggest movie in America right now: Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted. On Monday morning, you get a three sentence email from the owner saying you’re next on the block, with no further explanation required.

“Getting laid off as a dishwasher” is one of those phrases that just smacks of absurdity coming off the tongue. I believe this is what happened, but I don’t blame somebody listening to my plight for not fully believing this is what happened. Restaurants and bakeries aren’t exactly the places to do mass layoffs, or Zoom breakout rooms where one group finds out they’re spared and the other gets fucked. And yet, the same hubristic expansion and contraction, “economic headwinds,” and boom times immediately followed by swift, punishing correction that befall so many media companies and tech startups happened here too. I think the owner’s a nice guy who’s ultimately trying to fix an unwinnable situation, but at the end of the day, you’re just a line on a spreadsheet whose elimination makes a number go up. Whether you’re a bakery, the most trusted voice in music, or a marketing firm, there’s always a backdoor option to shed some people and make their colleagues absorb the work to grueling effect.

I realize this might not sound like the most glowing endorsement of professionally dishwashing, but I really intend for it to be. While most media expats, including myself, often run to jobs that are close enough to that industry, running in the opposite direction brought surprising contentment. I’d think things like “my life’s a power washing simulator fr” while slowly spraying and watching the sourdough starter droop away in dish bin after dish bin. I’d bond with the other guy who was quite helpful and nice about stealing bites of raw cookie dough whenever we could. I’m certainly not inventing the concept of getting a service job, but there’s something gratifying about finding scraps of dignity in a line of work that might not even require a high school degree. Nothing is linear in life; the humiliations can be discarded as quickly as they compound.

For now, I’ve been driving around for the grocery shopping startup as a stopgap (if you’re one of the few dozen people who saw Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, we call this “going Bobita mode”). I still apply to marketing and communications jobs — certainly well past the 100 mark by now — along with other service gigs that don’t do a battery on our car. I don’t worry much about the future now, or require the pride of having a full-time email job so long as the bills get paid, or harbor many regrets about how the past eight months have gone. I do wish I’d worn my headphones more in the kitchen.