1 Something Mindless/Labor Intensive

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I might have mentioned this before, but I used to wash dishes. I was a bartender for a year or two in college and, to make extra money, I'd hop in the kitchen on nights when I wasn't tending the bar and wash dishes. I really loved it, because I didn't have to use my brain at all, and in college, it's healthy to shut down once in a while in a way that doesn't involve alcohol.

I also learned about communication. All of the other in-kitchen employees spoke Spanish, and when I first started, I didn't speak a word of it. But, slowly, I'd pick a few things up here and there and, eventually, I learned how to ask in Spanish if someone wanted a drink (you mime holding a glass in your hand, pretend to drink from it and then shrug your shoulders as if to say, "Yes?".)

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But the most important lesson I learned? How to shut the hell up and work. I've worked a lot of jobs, and most of them offer plenty of opportunities to screw around and be lazy. Dish washing is not one of those jobs. When you show up, there's a big stack of dishes. If you don't clean them, there will A) be no clean dishes for the future and B) be no room for the other dirty dishes that are rapidly being dropped in front of you. In both scenarios, everyone is mad at you, so you need to rinse the dirty dishes and stick them in a big machine. When they're clean, you have to move them to a drying rack, or else the machine would get backed up. And when you return from the drying rack, there's a bigger stack of dirty plates waiting for you.