Goodbye, Work Friends

After four years, as she prepares to hand off to her successor, our workplace advice columnist reflects on the rewards and the frustrations of office life.

We spend a lot of our lives working, especially in the United States — 40, 50, 60 or more hours a week. We hold multiple jobs to make ends meet. The candle is perpetually burning at both ends. Hard work, we’re told, is a virtue. It allows us to contribute to society and support our families, serve our employers well. It makes sense, then, that for Work Friend — the column I have written for the past four years — the questions you asked reflected both practical and existential concerns.

For those four years, across 95 installments, writing the Work Friend column has afforded me a unique opportunity to reflect on the professional life. It has been a journey, indeed. At almost 50 years old, I have been working for a very long time. I’ve been paid hourly, on commission, as an independent contractor and on a salary. I’ve had good jobs, great jobs and terrible jobs. I’ve had good benefits and mediocre benefits, and there were many lean years when I had no health insurance and prayed I wouldn’t need medical care.

I’ve seen a lot in all kinds of workplaces. I’ve worked with quirky people and talkative people and folks who were practically invisible, just quietly coming to work, doing their job and minding their own business. At many jobs, I was that person, not antisocial but happy to maintain a separation of church and state.

My first job was working in the dish room of my high school dining hall. My dad suggested this so I could better understand the value of a dollar and the importance of hard work. I was, in retrospect, too immature to really understand the lessons he was trying to impart, but I certainly appreciate them now. Then, I was 13, a freshman. I worked only six hours a week or so, for something like $6 an hour, which is pretty remarkable given that this was nearly 40 years ago and today’s federal minimum wage is not much more than that.

The dish room is hot and wet and steamy. It’s loud, and the air is thick with disinfectant and institutional food. The pace is brisk. Trays laden with dirty dishes, leftovers, encrusted silverware and much worse slowly inched their way toward me on a conveyor belt. Washing teenagers’ dishes is thankless. Every shift, I saw all kinds of small horrors — mountains made of salad bar ingredients, peanut butter smeared along the edges of trays, piles of mashed potatoes dotted with pieces of fruit and, of course, the detritus of eaten meals. I didn’t mind the work, necessarily, but I chafed at how difficult my classmates made the task at hand.

My fellow dishwashers and I sorted dishes, glasses and the silverware. We sprayed them down with hot water and put them in the industrial dishwashing machine, where they were cleaned and sanitized. We pulled the clean, hot dishes out of the machine and stacked them to be used again. By the end of each shift, I was sticky and sweaty and tired. The best part of my day was stepping into the much cooler evening air to walk back to my dorm. While washing dishes, I learned a lot about how much we take for granted the invisible labor that makes our lives much easier. And I was beyond lucky. I was doing that job, less than part time, for only a brief period, while for the adults working in the dining hall, it was a more permanent and far less edifying condition.