I have done the unthinkable. I have resigned from my job although I don’t have another job lined up. Now I am facing some serious soul-searching, massive self-doubt, and a gut-wrenching longing for what I gave up. Oh, I am not talking about a steady paycheck, or lost benefits, or even the free food and coffee drinks available at my job that I always bragged about to my friends and family. I did love those things. But the intense pressure of my constantly changing environment, the maddening lack of staff, and the demanding overnight and weekend hours were just too much. When I began to notice my knees regularly buckling as I walked from the parking garage to my unit, that’s when I knew it was time to get out. I already knew my blood pressure was through the roof.
No, what I am going to miss so dearly is my employees, the students of OSU who worked so hard to feed other OSU students. Now, there are many, many jobs for students at OSU. Some work in the library, or they find a job in their dorm, or they do jobs that involve walking backwards all over campus talking to prospective high school students and their parents. And then there is the behemoth of Campus Dining, where I worked. It is the mother lode of student jobs because at OSU feeding students is nearly as important as educating them and it is nothing less than a gargantuan machine that pushes out food for close to 24 hours a day. And we relied on student labor to do most of the pushing.
The funny thing about students, though, is that most of them haven’t built up much of a resume in their 19 or 20 years. They come to us having worked for a summer at Dairy Queen or the local feed store or their aunt’s restaurant in China. Or they never worked a day in their life. They come to us with a checkerboard class schedule that leaves us pulling out our hair figuring out how to schedule them without making them work every single Friday and Saturday night. They come to us so cash-strapped that the Goodwill store on High Street is probably their only option for their required work uniform, a pair of black chino-style pants and black non-skid shoes.
And of course they come to us not understanding a thing about the restaurant business. Unlike all the other units that feed students on the meal plan at OSU, I managed an actual full-service, sit-down restaurant that provided a unique dining experience for students and the public at large. And by unique, I mean very hard to learn in just a few days. But that is all we could spare for training before pushing our new employees out on the floor to wait on other students. Having started in the restaurant business myself back in the 1990s, I remember only too well how strange and intimidating everything was, and being not comforted, but actually frightened, by all the people purposefully charging around inside of it. As a manager, I had to make it as unscary to these young people as possible.
Unfortunately, that is the inherent conflict in the restaurant business: it is nearly impossible to run a restaurant efficiently without being kind of scary. Well, firm and direct and unwilling to listen to arguments or entertain excuses. And in spite of being the scariest, meanest manager they had ever seen, this is how my deep respect and honest affection for my student workers was born because at the end of the day (literally) they always came through for me.
First there was Cory, a quiet sophomore who was with us when we first opened in March of 2010. Had Cory not needed to work 30 hours per week (the maximum allowed), I may never have noticed him at all except that he was always there, helping me close the restaurant at five o’clock in the morning. (Yes, I said five a.m.) He did dishes. He ran trash. He cleaned drains. He mopped floors. And he was one of the only students I trusted implicitly to clean “the coffee shop,” a confectionary area directly inside my restaurant that was a mini-restaurant in itself. Over the course of his one year with us, Cory met every single one of my requests with an even-toned “Okay,” never delivered with eye rolls or tongue clucks or an exasperated exhale of breath. At least not in front of me, which is all I asked of my student workers.
There was Will, a junior with a glorious teased-out Afro, who started as a bartender but quickly morphed into my go-to person for almost every job in the restaurant. Since we didn’t sell a lot of alcohol, Will first became my coffee shop pro, then my dish tank fall-back guy, and then we trained him as a server, a job he detested. We quickly came to an understanding that I would save him from serving as often as I could as long as he stood ready to carry out my every order which ran the gamut from finding me a case of Half ‘n’ Half somewhere in the building to manning the expo line for two hours. When a co-worker brought his Pokemon card collection to the restaurant for a few days, generating lots of whispers and snide comments, an exasperated Will finally exclaimed to me, “They need to just leave him alone! Everyone’s a freak.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Speaking of which, there was Tatiana, the kookiest 18 year-old goofball that ever came down the pike. From Day One Tatiana latched on to me in a bizarre Eddie Haskel-ish fashion, trailing me around the restaurant, meeting my every order or request with an enthusiastic, “ I’ll do it Kaki!” sometimes even fighting other students to handle a task I had assigned. Only I knew that Tatiana wasn’t brown-nosing. She was just a frustrated actress with a goofy persona who knew I didn’t take her antics very seriously. For some reason, she simply wanted just to please me. Or amuse me, which she did time after time.
A total surprise was Patrick, a sophomore who was sassy way beyond acceptability, yet so dependable that he nearly reached his one year anniversary without so much as being late for a single shift. Nearly. I caught Patrick leaning and loitering and texting while on duty more times than I care to remember and yet his spirited excuses were the catalyst for my sanity-saving epiphany that while I could try to micromanage every physical aspect of the restaurant, I could not micromanage my students’ personalities. I had to let them be themselves, or they would be miserable. And I could not have that.
In time, having some semblance of fun became the most important item on the agenda every night, however I could fit it in. As much as I deflated every time I learned that my scheduled dishwasher did not show up (which happened a lot), I always smile remembering the night that Karah and I went on dish duty and simply made a party out of it. We sang loudly and composed ridiculous dish-themed chants simply to send the message that working the dish tank was hands down the best job in the place. I was damned if I was going to have anyone think that any job in my restaurant was beneath me or intolerable.
And then there was Josh, a scrappy little guy from central Ohio who worked as a student cook, a challenging job under even the best conditions. From Day One Josh seemed out of his league alongside his peers, someone I would have pegged to fail simply because of his small build and unfailingly agreeable attitude, a flat-out rarity in a commercial kitchen. But somehow Josh outlasted them all, becoming indispensable to his chef supervisors, and to me. I can’t recall a single student who did as many dirty jobs as he did, or who refused to speak ill of his co-workers although plenty of times he had good reason to. Josh was killed in a car accident only two weeks ago.
In time, most of my student workers figured out that all I asked was that everyone just do their job, or at least try. If the restaurant was clean and well-stocked and the customers had full drinks and no empty plates in front of them, then I was okay with a little relaxing. At some point I had seen each and every one of them racing around the restaurant carrying large trays of steaming plates or a bus tub full of dirty dishes. I had seen them all lugging huge buckets of ice to refill the ice bins and dragging overflowing dumpsters of trash and linen to the loading dock. I had seen them all sweeping and mopping the floors at five o’clock in the morning, bleary-eyed and ready to cry because they had a class at ten a.m. Although most of them didn’t start out that way, they all ended up caring, in some small way, about their job, the restaurant, and the customers they served. I was proud to work with all of them.
And when I resigned, they cared, and that was the biggest surprise of all. So, thank you Cory, Tatiana, Patrick and Karah. Thank you Molly and Shelly and Sarah and Courtney and Crystal and Jake. Thank you to all my Joeys, Wills, Megans, Katies, Alexes, Brittanys and Sams . Thank you all from the bottom of my heart. And thank you Josh Elzey, may you rest in peace.
