It’s 1pm on a Monday afternoon. Outside the sun is out for the first time in 4 months. The light just about manages to fight its way down through the narrow high street and finds a small foothold in our humble little coffee shop. The store is half full, customers milling about in vacant little groups, doing annoying things such as getting in the way and ordering coffee. Behind the bar our team is steadily busy but not strenuously overworked. If asked I’d almost be able to say I was having a good day. Ok, "good" would be a stretch but it’s certainly one of the less shit days.
This is until there is a bang, a large shudder of machinery and finally a dying whine from behind me. The dishwasher has decided to pack it in, fed up with its routine day in day out, and has felt the best option is to malfunction.. We switch it off before it starts spewing water all over the floor.
>Now, while this is a pain in the ass, it’s not the biggest problem in the world. We have a spare dishwasher in the kitchen that can be used till maintenance arrives. I call the maintenance guy and then switch on the dishwasher upstairs. Now this dishwasher is slow, old and takes an age to fire up. It slowly wakes, creaking, rumbling and gearing up with a metallic groan. It’s kind of like the molten metal machine at the end of Alien 3. It takes a bloody age to come into operation (and can probably be used to trap Xenomorphs).
I get it started,. We wash dishes with it for a couple of hours. The maintenance guy arrives. He fixes the dishwasher downstairs. He leaves. We go back to using the original and everything is hunky-dory, right?
It’s 8.15pm. We shut the store at 7.30 and are now closing down. We get paid until 8.30, an hour being generally enough time to close the place down. We’re on target to get out on time. I've only got upstairs to sweep and three trays of dishes to wash. I’m upstairs sweeping. From downstairs I hear a bang, a large shudder of machinery and finally an all too familiar dying whine from downstairs. Shit shit and shit.
I run downstairs. The dishwasher has gone all Linda Blair on us, projectile vomiting it’s contents all over the floor. The bar now resembles a World War One trench, dirty water flooding every surface. I call Alex, the guy that I am closing with who is doing paper work in the office. He comes down stairs, swears some obscenities, throws his arms in the air and eventually formulates a plan; We will stick the washing we haven’t done in the kitchen upstairs for tomorrow morning, mop the water up now and leave the place as clean as we can get.
So the disgusting sludge water is mopped up, which takes us till 9.00. We dump the three trays of washing upstairs and then leave.
Nine and a quarter hours later. It's 6.15am. I’m back to open the store for Tuesday morning. I’m opening with my manager, Hazel, who is already inside. She has the eyes of an enraged rhino.
“Why the hell are there dirty dishes up in the kitchen?” she practically screams.
I don’t have to be putting up with this shabby crap, not at this time in the morning. I explain about the dishwasher, the flooding and the fact that we didn’t get out till 9.00.
It doesn’t placate her. “What about the other dishwasher? Why didn’t you use that?”
“Because then we would have been here to 9.30! Don’t give a farmer a Mini Cooper and complain when he struggles to plow a field.”
“Well it’s illegal to leave dirty dishes over night. You should have done them anyway.”
“Yeah, well it’s also illegal for me to be working without having an 11 hour consecutive work break between shifts.”
She shuts up. I win. She goes and cleans the dishes upstairs and is nice to me for the rest of the day.
Oh well. I suppose every cloud has its silver lining.
In short, don’t take any shabby crap and know your rights. You’d be surprised how quickly people shit their pants when the law is mentioned. And also try and avoid working in places with dishwashers.
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