Yes, I traveled to an Ivy-League school fifteen hundred and seventy-one point three miles away from home to ask that all-important question. I began my esteemed DDS career on a Friday night, from ten to two. Being the complete capitalist that I am, I chose this shift because you earn an extra dollar an hour. Of course, no one mentioned that you also completely sanitize and vacuum/mop all of Food Court. I arrived for work in my little green shirt and borrowed baseball cap that made me feel like an eight-year-old boy. The night began with sandwich and "wrap" making -- I think I broke more "wraps" than I successfully wrapped, and I definitely gave at least five people jalapeno "wraps" instead of white ones. Oops.
Once, I worked the hot line. I only worked it one time because when people ask what you recommend, apparently the correct answer isn't "the rice."
Maintenance would not be vacuuming and cleaning Food Court after it closed at one. Oh, no, that was my job. The first step in preparing Food Court for sleep is to wipe down all the tables with microquat. Yes, it's called microquat, though it's not a micro anything and I don't even know what quat means. It's basically a chemical that kills everything. Now, the tricky bit about wiping down tables is that there are usually still people sitting out there. So you have to carefully aim your microquat stream (it only causes cancer in 30 percent of lab mice ) toward the people sitting at tables next to the one you're cleaning. I prefer aiming for their body, but some of my coworkers say that spritzing at the food is more effective. The point of this, of course, is to encourage remobilization of the troops. It only works if you really douse them with the quat. So after you wipe down a table, you stack all the heavy wood chairs on it so that you can vacuum underneath. Next, you pull out the old vacuum, which is not nearly as effective or cool as the 'screw-n-suck' central vacs in the dorms. If you're me, you attempt to vacuum everything off the floor, from bread crumbs to french fries to full-size magazines, because you're too damn lazy to bend over and pick up large items (say, for example, a wallet). Sad to say, but the vacuums can't stand up to fries, let alone magazines (or wallets). By now, you've broken up a sweat and decided that this counts as aerobic exercise. The dining room looks snazzy. And then you realize that you have to pull all 181 heavy wood chairs back down. This is definitely the equivalent of going to the gym: you've done about two hundred reps of upper body lifting. And it's 1:43 am. You're done early! You bike home, down to the River (if you're me), narrowly missing vomiting students and cars. And (added bonus) if it's a Sunday or Tuesday night, you get to bed just in time to fall asleep and wake up for your nine so that you can sleep in a lecture hall instead of in a bed.
I vowed to give myself a week before I quit, but I started looking for jobs immediately. By the time I found an internship that was really cool and exactly what I wanted to begin with, I had begun to (gasp) enjoy work. Yes, there were some sassy Food Court times. There was the time the fro-yo machine wouldn't stop spurting out yogurt and we made a vanilla yogurt tower about eight inches high the time we got to use the pricing gun on the enviromugs in retrospect, these don't seem very exciting, but they had us rolling on the floor in laughter.
I learned a lot from working at Food Court. I learned that there are people who eat peanut-butter-and-tuna-on-a-tomato-wrap-with-stacker-pickles-and-honey-mustard sandwiches. I learned how to vacuum and mop and compost large quantities of food. I learned that getting along and having fun with your coworkers is the only way any job will be enjoyable. I learned that french fries are way too hard-core for vacuum cleaners. And I learned that an extra dollar an hour isn't worth sleeping through your nine, especially if it's a class that involves sodium and potassium pumps and many graphs.
When it came time to decide whether to accept the internship, I had to answer some tough internal questions (a bit like Hamlet). How could I disappoint all of my fellow DDSers? Did I want to be a quitter, a wimp, one of the weak ones who couldn't make it? No, no, I didn't. But did I want to see the interior of Thayer one more time? No, no, I didn't want to do that either. I weighed my good times at DDS with cleaning out the ketchup vat and filling up the compost buckets. I had to admit that I was having fun working with the crazy people, like the guy from New Hampshire who had girls waiting for him in his dorm room after every shift or the weird girl who ate all the ice cream toppings and took naps under the tables (oh, wait, that's me). I wore my graveyard shift like a badge of honor. I was having fun.
I still quit, though.
