Whenever I think about the value of something being done by a person who really understands the job from a lifetime of experience, I think of my first restaurant job. My goal was to work every position, and I started with a year and a half in the dish pit at 16yo.
When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He’d spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.
He’d seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn’t consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to “better” or “more important” things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he’d trained me.
But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.
That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.
The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this… and it wasn’t just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said
“When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?”
we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight
Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.
Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:
and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever
“This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.
If you don’t have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it’s done every single time? You can’t do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you’ll do 160 loads.
[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]
160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you’ll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.
And it means you’re going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.
For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i’m ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress.”
The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he’d spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out… The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.
It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career
Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn’t stay any later than he had to.
But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn’t really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.
But I’ve thought about Claudio and what i learned from him many MANY times in my life.
you’re 23 and you learn rosemary kennedy was lobotomized at 23 and you’re like my god she was barely an adult. then you’re 27 and you’re like holy hell amy winehouse was just starting her life. and then, presumably, you reach 36 and you’re like christ alive marilyn monroe was only 36. and so on and so forth
absolutely flabbergasting to see people who have so enthusiastically succumbed to despair. like okay denethor, but some of us are gonna actually face the armies of mordor in battle nonetheless.
if you’re gonna succumb to despair, don’t be Denethor. nobody likes Denethor and for good reason.
like generally speaking I recommend not despairing but if it’s REALLY the way you want to be, don’t be Denethor: be Eowyn.
the movie lies to you about Eowyn: it tries to tell you Eowyn’s actions are some kind of last ditch desperation. they were not.
Eowyn fully accepted that they were fucked. she’s fully perceived her side was doomed. she did not think it was worth bothering to defend the home places because Everyone Was Doomed and since everyone was doomed she was going to spend her doomed life in its last days doing what SHE thought was worthy and important.
she accepted and fully believed that EVERYONE WAS GOING TO DIE HORRIBLY and since she accepted that as inevitable, fuck everything, she was going to die ON THE BATTLEFIELD, she was going to die BESIDE HER KING AND FATHER FIGURE and even if there was nobody left to care afterwards she was going to die in accordance with the heroes of her ancestry that she valourized.
eowyn did not stand In Trembling Defiance before the Witch-King. she stood between him and Théoden with the “bring it, motherfucker” batshit calm of someone who knows they’re already dead and only cares about taking you with them.
she did not reveal that she was a woman as a last moment Gotcha. she pulled off her helmet and went NOW WHAT, FUCKFACE?:
“Begone, foul dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace!“
A cold voice answered: ‘Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye.”
A sword rang as it was drawn. “Do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may.”
“Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!”
Then Merry heard of all sounds in that hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel. “But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.”
Eowyn saw herself as a knight of Rohan, as a scion of royal blood whose duty was the service and protection of her king, the man who raised her, in his wars and on the battlefield.
and by fuck if the world was over and everyone was doomed then she was gonna meet that doom being what she fucking knew she was and she was gonna laugh in the face of everything that came out of the dark to kill her because what the fuck did they think they could do anyway she was already dead as far as she was concerned.
so if you MUST despair; if you must just … give up, don’t be Denethor. don’t sit there with your thumb up your ass interfering with shit other people are trying to do to mitigate the situation and see if they can help others survive; don’t sit there whining about how stupid it all is, how Everything Is Over Anyway, It’s All Pointless, We Might As Well Just Light Ourselves on Fire.
if you MUST decide it’s over before it’s over … at least do it like Éowyn Éomundsdaughter and get the fuck out there and put your body, your effort, yourself, between the dark and what you love because if We’re All Doomed Anyway you might as well go out laughing at the demons because they were Too Fucking Stupid see you for what you were and make it cost them.
or, you know - and I actually recommend this - you can just … admit that it’s scary, you’re fucking scared (we’re all fucking terrified) and overwhelmed maybe just small things are what you’re capable of because you never know, you might still be able to stab evil in the knee.
or at least run around the place carrying really important messages. or making sure people are still fed. or (crazy, I know) voting in a fucking election. (or donate to MSF - even if finances are rough they do have other ways to support that are helpful).
I recommend this because absolutely none of our batshit heroes would have been able to do much if there hadn’t been someone making sure that everyone got food and water and in the aftermath everyone woulda just finished dying if someone hadn’t been waiting through the Horrors to pull the wounded in and start treating them, and you can make that as metaphorical or literal as you like.
Which, yeah, the original post up there was much more pithy but I’m an autistic with a Special Interest and I’m just saying this metaphor is extremely extensible and even if you absolutely must despair, try throwing yourself between what you love and the threat in every way you can because you might as well go out doing that anyway, instead of getting in everyone else’s fucking way.
I love villains that are the reverse of the idea that the absence of love makes you evil. Villains that love to the point of paranoia and obsession. Villains whose love for someone corrupts them. Love being used for awful, evil things. Using love to justify horrific actions. Anything that breaks down the toxic idea that people who don’t feel love are monsters and those who feel love are always pure and heroic and morally right.
“what’s posted on the internet stays there forever” is true for everything except that one piece of fanart you saw when you were 10 that changed the trajectory of your life forever. you will never find that again it is gone forever
Sossusvlei is a salt and clay pan located on the edge of the Namib Desert in Namibia. The reddish sand dunes of the desert seen here are among the tallest in the world, with many rising more than 656 feet (200 m) in height. This image shows approximately 116 square miles (300 sq. km) of Sossusvlei.
You’re a regular office worker born with the ability to “see” how dangerous a person is with a number scale of 1-10 above their heads. A toddler would be a 1, while a skilled soldier with a firearm may score a 7. Today, you notice the reserved new guy at the office measures a 10.
You decide it’s best to find out what you can about this person. Cautiously, you approach his desk. He’s a handsome man, tall, but with a disarming smile. How could such a friendly guy with such cute, dorky glasses be dangerous?
You extend your hand. “I noticed you’re new here. What’s your name?”
He shakes your hand warmly. His gaze is piercing, as if he’s looking right through you. “The name’s Clark,” he says. “So, how long have you worked for the Daily Planet?”
the transition from people needing each other to wanting each other is literally one of my greatest weaknesses that shit makes me want to walk into the sea and sit on the ocean floor for a thousand years
like. characters whose entire self worth is based on how useful they can be to others, who think that they’re going to be abandoned as soon as they’re no longer necessary, being told by someone that they want them to stay and realizing that they have value to people in and of themselves and not just for what they can do for them will never fail to completely unmake me. like on a molecular level.
