What I Learned from a Sex-Crazed Short-Order Cook

Restaurant's signature was french onion soup, so we had these little crockware pots coated in melted cheese that Every Single Customer had to order. Ugh. Lots of scrubbing in very hot water.

Dave was the cook's name, he was a drummer in a band in Athens Ga (drove up from Atlanta for every show) at the time when indie bands from there were the thing. He set my musical tastes on a track they never recovered from.

It felt good to start buying records with money from my own job. It really did.

You can't pass the problem to later. Steak is not cooked right? Wrong salad dressing? Let's have a meeting tomorrow and talk about it. No. Gotta address it RIGHT NOW.

When you get in the weeds, meaning you're overwhelmed, you gotta stop doing what's not 100% required and hustle, hustle, hustle. Don't talk to people, just do your job super fast.

Last rule: you have to be prepared for the day: gotta have the food ready by the time the front door opens. You can't say at 12:03 that there's no iced tea. Everything has to be prepared ahead of time. If you've not prepared everything as well as possible, you're gonna be screwed. Even small things like rolling silverware in napkins will kill you if you have a party of 15 ready to sit down clogging up the front lobby and you can't sit then down because you're out of freaking silverware.

So: prepare well, resolve problems as they arise, and hustle when you're overwhelmed.

Last rule: don't whine. If 19 years old Becky can do it, you can too.

10 years in catering (a pub kitchen and then a steak restaurant chain) starting as a pot washer, then commis chef all the way to grill chef including stints as acting head chef in a couple of other local restaurants in the chain.

Constant hard graft that had 99% of deadlines measured in single digit minutes not months.

It also meant I had no problems getting part time work whilst at University. I could walk straight back in to the job each term/semester, and also continue work back home during the holidays. I left University almost debt free despite getting no grant[1] and no money from parents (they couldn't afford to).

1. The UK system of subsidising University students that was in place in the 90's. This was the days before there were course fees.

Then I thought about it some more and decided to give the writer the benefit of the doubt - he stresses the sex-crazed aspect of the cook to paint a clearer image of the type of person, even though it doesn't really come up in the story. Starting the article with that fact planted in my head even before the first paragraph probably made a big difference to my reading of it.

It's also possibly a not-too-suble nod to the comedy movie "Waiting", which featured a sex-crazed chef.

“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”

— Steve Jobs

They wouldn't let guys be cashiers, though, so it was making burgers and cleaning pots for a whole summer.

If you let your mise-en-place [your working area, your setup] run down, get dirty and disorganized, you'll quickly find yourself spinning in place and calling for backup. I worked with a chef who used to step behind the line to a dirty cook's station in the middle of the rush to explain why the offending cook was falling behind. He'd press his palm down on the cutting board, which was littered with peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, breadcrumbs, and the usual flotsam and jetsam that accumulates quickly on a station if not constantly wiped away with a moist side-towel. "You see this?" he'd inquire, raising his palm so that the cook could see the bits of dirt and scraps sticking to his chef's palm, "That's what the inside of your head looks like now. Work clean!"

Any time I catch myself trying to rush through some piece of tricky coding, Bourdain's chef steps behind me and says, "Work clean!"

People definitely love telling these stories. Hearing them, maybe not so much.

I worked through college dishwashing in a kitchen, cleaning hot pans and preparing food for impatient customers. This line immediately resonated with me:

> I still haven’t forgotten what I learned that summer. I learned the best way to sort silverware, dumping it out on the counter with each hand independently grabbing for knives, then forks, then spoons. I learned that I could work my way out of despair.

Based on how you sort silverware, I can tell whether or not you've worked in a kitchen. If you do it the correct way, then I'm also willing to bet you know how to work smart under pressure.

Cleaning both sides is a good idea.

However, the old man who ran the restaurant really liked you to scrub the carbon off the bottom of the pots and pans. To this day I have no idea why.

I always used to say every university student should tend bat or tables for a month - it teaches you more about customer service than a year of once a week customer meetings.

In high school I was paid $10/hour in the 90's to unload wagons full of hay and stack them in a barn.

There are machines that will bale, load, and stack hay. But they cost like $80k and require a modern tractor that costs $150k new. The farmers I worked for used a tractor from the mid-1950's, and didn't have enough land to generate the cash flow necessary to pay for the equipment.

So they paid about $10-12k/summer for people to do the work manually.

But they are not cheap: my aunt couldn't afford one for her deli, for example, but she could afford me!

But it's still going to be someone's job to load the thing up, and for manual intervention on pieces that can't be blasted, or need extra scraping.

Isaac Newton is evidence that you're mistaken. If young person with talent and ambition were to mistakenly believe you, the most common outcome is that they'd become shadows of their former potential a few years later.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Work harder, and faster.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Don't sweat details that don't matter.

It doesn't matter how hard you work if you aren't getting the work done. You don't get points for trying.

Practising ambidextrous cutlery sorting increases proficiency at ambidextrous cutlery sorting ( http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1991/01/19 ).

So many common TLDRs of this story template.

* You can often get things done faster by doing a half-assed job.

* Robots have not advanced far enough to wash dishes yet.