The Games Have Been Changed

I used to work as a dishwasher in my college cafeteria during the summer season, when the campus would host events. Diners would set their dirty trays on top of a conveyor belt, which rolled them back into the dishwashing room, where I would collected the plates before the got to the end of the belt, where if not retrieved, would fall and smash to the floor. The cafeteria manager's grandsons worked there too, but they never lifted a finger, not really seeing a need to since their grandmother never got on their case to do anything around there. During hectic, crazy, busy lunch hours, I was slammed with work, grabbing hundreds of plates off the conveyor belt at a time to keep them from hitting the floor like an I Love Lucy skit. 'Til finally, one day I'd had it. I started grabbing one plate at a time, washing it casually, while the clusters of trays paraded past me, and the sound of plates crashing to the linoleum floor echoed across the back of the building. Minutes later, the manager frantically sent her grandsons into the dishwashing room to start grabbing plates and trays, and worked their asses off.

After looking at my lack of hours on next week's work schedule, and discussing it with one of my more trusted allied managers, it is becoming clear that I am being phased out. Not for not being a great employee and hard worker, but for not getting as many metrics as some of the others (i.e., magazine subscriptions, membership cards, etc).

And the thing is, I thought I had been. But the ones that I had been getting weren't being counted, due to a miscommunication. From their perspective, I haven't gotten any in months. Therefore, I haven't any value to the company. They would rather take a chance on a new kid coming straight off the street who might get those metrics up, to wasting any more time on someone like me, who has proven that she can't.

I sat in the handicapped stall in the ladies room and cried my mascara off for about a half an hour, then sat on the sink with a folded up piece of paper towel to fan my face, trying to get the red eyes to dry, for another 20 minutes or so. Oddly, I was hardly missed. I usually get paged out the wahoo any time I duck into the toilet for a quick pee.

And then I went back to work. Despite the new kids loafing around the store, or the managers chatting for over an hour about nothing in particular. And I worked hard. Because that's what I do. Disgruntlement won't chance my work ethics.

That doesn't mean, however, that from here on out I might let a few dishes fall.