THE DISHWASHER

In a previous life I was a dishwasher. Not the machine, obviously, but I suppose if someone told me that was the case I'd most likely be too tired to partake in the discussion and merely live out my life as a somewhat sentient kitchen appliance. 
It was the beginning of the 2010s when I realised that living at home, going to school and having no money to my name - except what I received for birthdays and Christmas - made it rather difficult to do anything with friends who themselves did have money. People wanted to go to the movies, fast food restaurants or drink, and though I understood and knew of the first two, the last one was more alien to me. I hadn't had a drop of alcohol or smoked a whiff of a cigarette when I entered highschool. Blonde, blue eyed and in bright red trousers held up with striped suspenders, pronouncing myself 'straight edge', I stood like a walking, talking dodgeball target. Good thing I didn't yet wear glasses OH WAIT, I DID, and they were fake and it was purely for looks because I thought that being a living, breathing advertisement for bullying was the best way to start my high school endeavour. Alas, the mates I went to school with didn't seem to care much about such things, as they themselves dressed ridiculously - only different flavours of it - so that wasn't much of a problem; but the lack of money was. 
So I decided to get a job. I'd had jobs before, my first was delivering newspapers around my neighbourhood, but I believe that came to a close as my mother decided she didn't want to continue doing all the actual work for me. I was a lazy sod. I think I expected life as a mail delivery boy to be a quick little adventure on calm Saturday mornings. But as I wasn’t getting paid immediately the fuel on my Postman Pat wagon ran out rather quickly. 
The way the job worked was that you were delivered an avalanche of newspapers and local magazines, and a thin piece of paper plastered in ads used for neatly arranging them into deliverable little parcels. One of each for every mailbox and then you’d pack that into a wagon, and walk or cycle around delivering the 'news'. News in inverted commas, obviously, as most of it was local magazines for small religious organisations and places to buy clothes for women over forty. The living room smelled of printer cartridges for weeks. Sitting here, a whole twelve years later, smelling nothing in particular, I can still detect a faint waft of the almost sticky freshly printed pages. It was hard manual labour but when you wanted money, that was the work a young lad could partake in.

My next foray into the world of work came in the form of a computer repair job. That’s what I’ve been calling it anyway. When I say computer repair, what I actually mean is, take this old Lenovo laptop, install windows, and while you wait for that, piss about the warehouse while your mate from school - who was offered the same job - blasts LMFAO’s ‘Party Rock Anthem’ from the warehouse speaker. In retrospect that sounds exhausting. That sort of music is saved purely for nostalgia infused drunken benders where at least one person in the near vicinity knows how to shuffle. 
It paid pretty well though. I had the job for about a year till the boss pulled us out of the warehouse and announced that he’d only call us in when there was work for us, since we’d gotten through most of the backlog. He never did call back. 

Back in highschool, however, I was looking about for jobs. I had my first and only ever job interview back then, which I must admit at the age of twenty six is rather impressive. It was to work as a barista at a newly opened coffee shop and I liked coffee, so I thought why the hell not. Poor bloke doing the interview made the grave error of asking if I had anything I liked doing in my spare time. And I reciprocated with my own personal form of stupidity and answered everything from movies, to music, to acting, to whatever. Young and ignorant as I was, I assumed more stuff meant better chances. And since the man didn’t stop me I must have been blabbering for a full five minutes before I came to a triumphant close.
“Thank you, that's all we’ll need. I’ll give you a call”. 
He did end up giving me a call, only to tell me that perhaps I had a bit much going on to have time for a job. He also mentioned that I ‘didn’t have the right energy to fit with the rest of the team’. Which I assume means ‘you won’t shut the fuck up and you’re trying to hard’. To be fair, I was.
My second job application was more successful. Didn’t even have to do an interview. I applied for the job and got a phone call the next day. 
“Hello there, you’ve applied to be a dishwasher, right?” 
Quite friendly, deep and warm was the voice of the man on the other end.
“How about you come in tomorrow? I've got a bloke who can’t make it, so you’d be taking his spot. I’ll have someone show you how to do it all.”

And away I went, right off of school, for my first ever real job. 
The Green Café. 
The place was right next to a gym so the food was mostly pearl barley and rocket salads that someone had whispered chicken at from the other side of the kitchen. Well seasoned enough, I suppose, but everything just inevitably tasted like the kitchen, water and bags of mixed salad. The chefs that worked there were competent enough. Unfortunately, they were forced to cook the most uninspiring food money could buy. I distinctly remember during a shift with a girl I quite fancied - not that she was my type or we had any sort of chemistry, she was just older than me - we were halfway through eating another vile pearl barley creation when she asked me:
“Are you working on Wednesday?” 
“Yes, how come?
“I think Dan might be in the kitchen. Ask him for a chicken omelette, then you’ll taste some real food.”

I came into work more excited than usual, and the man they called Dan, was most certainly in the kitchen. He might’ve been in his early twenties, but for my money at the time, he was an old wise bald cook with caved in eyes.
“Hey, I was told to ask for a chicken omelette.” I dared ask halfway through my shift after many hours of almost doing so. 
“Oh they’ve told you, have they? Wrapping the chicken in its children. Gimme ten minutes.”
Quite a gross way to describe a chicken omelette, even if it is true. But I remember thinking that was possibly the coolest thing I’d heard since Metallica’s ‘One’. Ten minutes later I was served what I remember being the best food I’d ever had. It was to die for. Dan, however, was now being pestered with requests for omelettes every time I was at work and it must have gotten to him pretty bad, because a few weeks later, he quit. Either that or because the head chef was a piece of shit who yelled like he had three michelin stars when in reality he had a glorified salad bar. 
After Dan had left, over time so did the other people I knew. Now I was no longer part of the cool club with the older kids, I was just doing dishes. The shifts were physically hard and all that money that I’d earned I had no time to spend with my friends anyway so what was the point? 
I desperately wanted to quit but like my current self, sixteen year old Philip wasn’t getting in a conflict unless he absolutely had to. I don’t think there would have been much conflict to be honest, but it’s nice to see that the overthinking has extended well into my twenties - thank you very much. 
I concocted a plan to get fired instead, that’d surely work. I started showing up three hours late for shifts. Unfortunately, the people in the kitchen were quite overbearing and simply stated that I could just stay ‘till I’d finished. I remember getting picked up by my mum at twelve o’clock on a school night. She was angry at the staff for working me that late, but I mean, I’d done it to myself. I was forced to do the one thing I didn’t want. I sat down with a distinct lack of confidence, shaky fingers, and wrote my boss a long heartfelt email about how school was hard and therefore I had to quit. He wrote back.
“Thanks for letting me know. I hope you enjoyed your time with us. We appreciate all your hard work. Thanks for now”.
Just as easy as I got the job, just as easily had I gotten away.

I recently went with my mum to the gym in that same building and realised the place had shut down, and that all their seating had been replaced by workout machines. I find it hauntingly beautiful that only ten years prior, the calm voice I'd heard on the phone was throwing temper tantrums over a salad bar where you couldn't even choose your own toppings.