
What I Learned from a Sex-Crazed Short-Order Cook - kirillzubovsky
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130313143038-5434591-best-advice-what-i-learned-from-a-sex-crazed-short-order-cook
======
stuff4ben
As a former dishwasher and line cook at the local steak house when I was
growing up, I relate almost exactly what this guy said. I was 15 and sucked at
washing dishes. We had this one guy, Snoopy was his nickname. Dude was so fast
at washing dishes I wanted to be exactly like him. But it was how he attacked
it that stuck with me. Organize what you can, soak the stuff with caked on
crap, wash what needs washing first (plates for cooks, silverware and cups for
waitresses, biscuit pans, then baking pans), sling plates around like a
madman, get soaked to the bone, and never let your feet stop dancing. And
exactly like this guy, I too can sort silverware with each hand independently
(I have to admit I'm pretty awesome at this). Speed, speed, speed was what
Snoopy drove into me. To this day I do the same things as a developer/devops
person at work. Organize, prioritize, speed, speed, speed...iterate.

~~~
chris_mahan
Ya, spent 10 years in the restaurant industry. Started as dishwasher, then
busboy, salad cook, etc, then waiter, bartender, doing deliveries, and finally
manager. Here's the lessons I took with me to coding:

You can't pass the problem to later. Steak is not cooked right? Wrong salad
dressing? Let's have a meeting tomorrow and talk about it. No. Gotta address
it RIGHT NOW.

When you get in the weeds, meaning you're overwhelmed, you gotta stop doing
what's not 100% required and hustle, hustle, hustle. Don't talk to people,
just do your job super fast.

Last rule: you have to be prepared for the day: gotta have the food ready by
the time the front door opens. You can't say at 12:03 that there's no iced
tea. Everything has to be prepared ahead of time. If you've not prepared
everything as well as possible, you're gonna be screwed. Even small things
like rolling silverware in napkins will kill you if you have a party of 15
ready to sit down clogging up the front lobby and you can't sit then down
because you're out of freaking silverware.

So: prepare well, resolve problems as they arise, and hustle when you're
overwhelmed.

Last rule: don't whine. If 19 years old Becky can do it, you can too.

~~~
superuser2
This sounds a lot like stage management.

That problem you just heard about? The audience is going to see it too if you
don't fix it. Right. Now. And it's not going to get fixed unless you do it
yourself or have someone else capable do it - you are in control, and if you
don't make something happen, it doesn't happen. And while you're managing
crises, you still have to fly the airplane - the performance crashes without
your voice guiding it along.

You have to think through plans, make sure they will work and nothing will get
in the way, and then execute them quickly and correctly, or you and the people
you're responsible for are detracting from the quality of other people's hard
work. Sure, you can get it right next time, but this is live. There is no
editing. If you screw up, you screw up, everyone knows it, and you've blown
the suspension of disbelief. But there isn't time to get flustered or argue
over blame, because another cue is rapidly approaching. And sometimes, things
that are nobody's fault will arise, and you'll have to work around those too.
(Actor injured? Call 911, get them out the rear loading dock, and keep calling
the show. Or know when to stop it. Building power outage? Get out there and
get control of the audience, get some flashlights, and lead a safe
evacuation.)

I don't think there's any exercise in high school with more real-world
significance than that.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
And the screw-up: calling the wrong backdrop on the wrong scene with an open
curtain; realizing it 10 seconds later; calling it back up to drop the right
one; thinking "everybody is going to notice that...I look like an idiot."

And then finding out nobody noticed or saw. Taught me an important lesson: The
world is much less likely to notice my mistakes than I am, which means I can
screw up more without worry as much.

Yeah, I was an uptight kid, still.

------
javanix
Well, yes, if you put 'Sex-Crazed' in the title of your blog entry I will read
it. I won't feel great about it, but I'll read it.

~~~
JDGM
Indeed. I felt a bit cheated by the end that the only appearance of this "sex-
crazed" side was: "He sexually harassed waitresses using a long pair of tongs
to increase his range. After drinks in the parking lot, he drove them around
on his Ninja 1000."

Then I thought about it some more and decided to give the writer the benefit
of the doubt - he stresses the sex-crazed aspect of the cook to paint a
clearer image of the type of person, even though it doesn't really come up in
the story. Starting the article with that fact planted in my head even before
the first paragraph probably made a big difference to my reading of it.

~~~
csharpminor
Lack of a sex-crazed mentor aside, I'd like to go on record to say that this
was the most enjoyable 5 minutes I have ever spent on linkedin.

~~~
user24
didn't even realise I was on linkedin.

~~~
csharpminor
I managed to escape the site without being asked to "connect" with every
single person I've ever contacted via gmail. Hooray!

------
flatline
I liked this story a lot, but I had a slightly different experience. I started
washing dishes in a bakery over the summer, at age 12. Somewhere in the summer
of my 16th or 17th year, I think the boss finally realized that I was simply
better at other things, after years of what must have been charity on his part
to keep me on. He could bang out a full sink of dishes in about three minutes.
For me it took closer to 30, so while we generally never quite ran out, there
was never an opportunity for me to do anything else. I just couldn't leave
them dirty, not even a little bit. I found the concept of not doing a 100% job
to be repulsive for some reason. I sometimes still do, and it does cause
problems when I should have just stopped at 90% (or more like 30% with the
dishes) -- perfectionism definitely has some drawbacks.

I did much better as a cashier.

~~~
tsotha
Hah! That was me at McDonald's. One night everyone else was waiting
impatiently in the dining room at 1:00 AM as I was furiously scrubbing pots
sparkly clean. The team lead came over, observed my technique for a few
minutes, sighed, and said "Most people just knock the worst of it off. We want
to go home."

They wouldn't let guys be cashiers, though, so it was making burgers and
cleaning pots for a whole summer.

~~~
shard
Is not letting guys be cashiers a corporate rule, or just in that particular
McDonald's? What's the reasoning behind that?

~~~
xenophanes
There is a male cashier at my local McDonalds, so it can't be a universal rule
today.

I think it sounds more like a dumb quirk of one store than corporate policy.

~~~
tsotha
Yeah, I don't think it's corporate policy. I don't think it was corporate
policy even decades ago when I worked there. Probably illegal now.

When we complained about it the manager said "If you came here to buy a meal,
who would you rather see?" As a teenage boy I couldn't argue with that logic.

------
waterside81
For more stories from the kitchen, perseverance, entrepreneurship and
debauchery, I highly recommend Anthony Bourdain's book Kitchen Confidential.

[http://www.amazon.ca/Kitchen-Confidential-Anthony-
Bourdain/d...](http://www.amazon.ca/Kitchen-Confidential-Anthony-
Bourdain/dp/0747553556)

~~~
wpietri
Yes, yes, yes. It contains this chunk of text that is perfectly applicable to
coding:

 _If you let your mise-en-place [your working area, your setup] run down, get
dirty and disorganized, you'll quickly find yourself spinning in place and
calling for backup. I worked with a chef who used to step behind the line to a
dirty cook's station in the middle of the rush to explain why the offending
cook was falling behind. He'd press his palm down on the cutting board, which
was littered with peppercorns, spattered sauce, bits of parsley, breadcrumbs,
and the usual flotsam and jetsam that accumulates quickly on a station if not
constantly wiped away with a moist side-towel. "You see this?" he'd inquire,
raising his palm so that the cook could see the bits of dirt and scraps
sticking to his chef's palm, "That's what the inside of your head looks like
now. Work clean!"_

Any time I catch myself trying to rush through some piece of tricky coding,
Bourdain's chef steps behind me and says, "Work clean!"

~~~
anchorsteam
He's right. Constantly redressing entropy keeps your mind free for the big
picture once it's time to make hay.

------
codexon
What I learned from reading the Nth variation of this story:

People love hearing about what a bad situation you were in before and how it
leads to your success because you are more desperate than everyone else.

~~~
kevinskii
As a child I used to get rather irritated whenever my nanny or butler
complained about their impoverished circumstances.

People definitely love telling these stories. Hearing them, maybe not so much.

~~~
krichman
What you may not have considered is that people like even less when someone
complains about trivial problems during their wealthy upbringing.

"Mother! The staff is whinging again!"

~~~
ryanmolden
I'll assume your comedy detector is mis-calibrated, I have a hard time
thinking someone could post here about the "tiresome whining of their
servants" in anything but a joking manner.

~~~
krichman
I surely hope so. It was such a derivation from the topic at hand (rags to
riches vs. complaining servants) that, if it was satire or irony, I don't get
what the joke or lesson was supposed to be.

Edit: Perhaps the lesson it that they are tired of reading hard work your way
to fortune stories? That does make sense, I was probably wrong in my comment
above.

~~~
codexon
I don't mean to put down any rags to riches people but if we were to believe
the often repeated lessons, then we should be shipping ourselves to Africa in
order to become the next billionaire.

I smell survivorship bias.

------
niggler
“WHEN IN THE HISTORY OF THIS RESTAURANT HAS ANYONE EATEN FROM THE BOTTOM OF
THESE PLATES?"

While not quite the same, I'm reminded of Jobs' comment regarding a furniture
maker who made sure the backs of the furniture were finished

~~~
ipsin
In my world, plates are stacked on top of each other prior to use.

Cleaning both sides is a good idea.

~~~
rodly
He was probably referring to cleaning (scrubbing, rinsing off, etc) the bottom
of the plate prior to putting it on a rack that was about to be pushed through
the dishwasher. The bottoms would be clean at this point, but it would be
wasted time to spend extra seconds clearing visible food from the bottom of a
plate.

------
anigbrowl
_a wider world where hardly anyone else had ever washed dishes for a living_

There's around half a million restaurants in the US, and turnover of kitchen
staff is high, so I don't understand how he concludes this. Maybe he's talking
about his social circle, but there's no shortage of people out there working
hard at shit jobs. I can't say I care for this style of humblebrag.

~~~
calinet6
Have _you_ washed dishes for a living?

~~~
anigbrowl
I have. I call it a shit job because it's very hard for not much pay. It's
also repetitive and reactive, so once you've achieved competence, there isn't
really anywhere you can go with it; it's up (to a better job in the kitchen)
or out. I moved up to cooking, but I don't feel the same nostalgia as this
writer for being a dishwasher. Of the various manual labor jobs I've done, I
preferred construction work because it provides a sense of progress and offers
more opportunities for skills development and variety as well as teamwork.
YMMV.

~~~
eitally
I suspect that the percentage of knowledge workers in Europe & the US/CA who
have held menial jobs prior to entering the professional workforce is
significantly higher than the percentages in developing countries. I could be
way wrong, but it seems there's far less social stigma attached to holding
service jobs in countries where everyone knows there are attainable,
relatively straightforward to achieve, better options, compared to countries
where the middle class is still much smaller and a large percentage of service
workers know going in they'll be holding those types of jobs for life.

~~~
amalag
Yes in Asian cultures there is much more of a stigma with manual labor. It is
a huge difference with western countries where work is valued no matter what
it is.

~~~
anigbrowl
That's a good point; I overlooked that context.

------
kirillzubovsky
"When all hell is breaking loose, organize yourself first" - My favorite point
in this story.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Completely - "when all around you are losing theirs"

I always used to say every university student should tend bat or tables for a
month - it teaches you more about customer service than a year of once a week
customer meetings.

------
grownseed
Thanks for this, had a good laugh reading it! Cooking is my other passion
right next to programming and I've worked in kitchens quite a bit, an
occasional plunger but mostly a chef, on-and-off since I was 14 (don't
ask...). Haven't been back to chef-ing in about 5 years, but I miss it quite a
lot for various reasons.

It's taught me stuff about handling stress I don't think I could have learnt
anywhere else, and making a bad situation fun is definitely a good place to
start.

I think the tech world lacks this sort of attitude drastically ; I also notice
that a lot of people in our sector simply can't handle stress and high
workloads very well. That might be part of the reason I did pretty well when I
went back to programming.

The problem with most jobs requiring a higher level of education (very
generally speaking) is that they separate the maker of the product (or at
least the person who delivers it) from the client. What it means is that
there's rarely any direct feedback either way. Because of the shift in
knowledge, you could deliver a sh*t product that your client will love, and
vice-versa.

In most cases, this wouldn't happen in a kitchen. You most likely wouldn't
even be able to get through the first day without communication. Your work
would be meaningless without feedback from your clients and your team (good
and bad), chances are you wouldn't even have a job any longer.

I'm not saying this doesn't apply to tech jobs, but there seems to be a
certain latency in and "transformation" of the feedback that's passed around.
It basically misses that social and professional rawness which I often miss :)

~~~
Evbn
When has a dishwasher ever talked to a diner?

------
nnq
I wonder why nobody found _a way to completely automate the dish-washing
process_? Is it really that hard? Couldn't you have dish-type-customized trays
and a "monster machine" you could load them into and get them out clean and
dried? (This is one of the jobs I've really like to be _made to disappear_ ,
viscerally, no matter how many people depend on this type of job. I've worked
as a dishwasher myself but even as a young boy I realized I'm not gonna stand
doing it, so I used all my cunning and reality-distorting abilities to get out
of it to a better position in less than 3 days).

~~~
Spooky23
That kind of equipment is expensive. Dishwashers, not so much. Many times,
dishwashers are under the table workers anyway.

In high school I was paid $10/hour in the 90's to unload wagons full of hay
and stack them in a barn.

There are machines that will bale, load, and stack hay. But they cost like
$80k and require a modern tractor that costs $150k new. The farmers I worked
for used a tractor from the mid-1950's, and didn't have enough land to
generate the cash flow necessary to pay for the equipment.

So they paid about $10-12k/summer for people to do the work manually.

------
paulrademacher
Fun story, but I'm gonna guess that the things he thought he learned on that
job, he already had inside him. It was the first time he got to really apply
his natural drive.

------
beachstartup
working out of the weeds is great because there is a two-sided battle being
waged in your own mind the ENTIRE time

the side that says "this is an impossible situation" and the side that says
"you've done this a thousand times before, keep going."

------
foohbarbaz
When I was a teenager I worked in a kitchen. A few times. Worst. Thing. Ever.
20 hour day, 4 hours of sleep, then a day off (regular work). Then another
shift, sometimes. Back breaking. Absolutely worst. Still wonder how people do
that. Shudder. Had recurring nightmares for the next 20 years about being
drafted again.

------
cafard
Scrubbing? I really have to wonder.

I worked in restaurants as a high-school student 40 years ago, and at that
time the dishwashers (human) put the plates into racks and shoved them into
dishwashers (appliances). Manual intervention for tableware was limited to
transfer to the racks at one end of the appliance, and from that the other.

~~~
ritchiea
I quit my first job out of college and did a few months of part time
restaurant work as I figured out what exactly I wanted to do with myself
professionally. We actually scrubbed dishes and that was 2010. We had a
sanitizer that heated dishes to kills germs but it didn't clean them. This was
in Brooklyn and a pretty common setup.

------
pseut
Not to be (too) dismissive, but anyone can work a crap job for a summer in
college. Have a shit full time job after college (hypothetically: file clerk
at a nursing agency in in emeryville) -- that teaches you a different level of
life lessons & desperation.

~~~
kragen
The thing about this entry, though, is that it tells you how he had to change
in order to _succeed_ at that job. Which is a job, by the way, that I _failed_
at, for exactly the reason he was failing. I just didn't have the mentorship
he did. Or maybe I did, but I didn't listen. I don't know, it's been a long
time.

------
JoeAltmaier
Love. This is the experience every young person needs, in order to grow up
useful.

~~~
sillysaurus
_Love. This is the experience every young person needs, in order to grow up
useful._

Isaac Newton is evidence that you're mistaken. If young person with talent and
ambition were to mistakenly believe you, the most common outcome is that
they'd become shadows of their former potential a few years later.

~~~
jamessb
When Isaac Newton came to Cambridge, he matriculated a subsizar, meaning that
he effectively worked as a menial servant rather than paying fees.

Relevant section of Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton -
[http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3ngEugMMa9YC&pg=PA71&...](http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3ngEugMMa9YC&pg=PA71&lpg=PA7)

~~~
sillysaurus
The commentator said, "Love. This is the experience every young person needs,
in order to grow up useful."

I took this to mean, "Every young person needs to experience love to grow up
useful." i.e. a relationship.

I hope nobody who upvoted me felt that hard work is unnecessary.

------
cududa
This resonates particularly well with me. I've worked at 3 places in my life.
The first was a summer camp, where I was often a dish washer.

Being exposed to the skills of maintaining precision, order, and process under
extreme stress is a massively valuable skill that you can cary through life.
I'm just glad I learned it when the highest stakes were the lunch backup
delaying dinner from being cooked - and not managing millions of dollars of
investor's money.

(Ironically my only place of employment between my company and that summer
camp was at Microsoft, about 5 minutes away from the Red Robin mentioned in
the post)

------
tomjen3
Hmm, I am not sure his points really apply to programs given that it would be
trivial to program if we knew exactly what the problem we were trying to solve
was.

Hard to prioritize when we don't know what is more important (relatively to
the amount of time it takes), easy to prioritize when you have 10 different
kinds of things to wash.

And yes, I would fail as a dishwasher. That is why I am a programmer.

------
calinet6
Reminds me of Thomas Keller's famous clock in the kitchen, with the words
"Sense of Urgency" printed below. It hangs in the kitchens of all his
restaurants.

I try to remember it when I start to lose that sense of urgency, and it works
well.

~~~
Evbn
When I lose my sense of urgency, my mind unlocks and I can see the forest for
the trees and solve big problems.

~~~
pseut
Really? I'm back and forth on this, and the unlocking usually comes after
periods of urgency even if I've moved on to something else. But "urgency"
definitely is different than "panic" or "frantic".

------
joshrotenberg
I had a few high school dishwashing gigs myself. The rib house was the most
memorable. Cleaning up BBQ sucked. I learned I never wanted to do that again.

------
epynonymous
most people are missing the point, it's not the dish washing or the food
industry, it's these lessons learned:

1\. create some type of order (clean env) in the chaos 2\. coach 3\. trust
those that you hire old saying in chinese, leverage those you trust, dont
leverage those you dont trust) 3\. motivate/reward/acknowledge

purely management, great!

------
d0c5
You can't beat a good hard graft. Massive self esteem ensues after you SMASHED
it @ work.

------
michaelochurch
[ETA: original title was "YOU'RE AN ANIMAL" (linkedin.com)]

I was really fucking hoping to see a LinkedIn profile for somebody's dog or
something.

------
DelvarWorld
this is a boring article about an overworked dishwasher with no life lessons
to gain and using 'sex' as a cheap title catch. skip it.

~~~
eitally
Bullshit -- plenty of people, especially technical folks or individuals
working in IT more generally -- still haven't learned the lessons of hard work
and problem solving + prioritization of tasks under pressure. Even if it's
treacly, it's still worth hearing the same thing for the millionth time. I can
tell you, for one, that I'll reshare this link in a place where my team might
see it (especially for the benefit of the remote teams in Mexico, Brazil, and
India, where programmers tend to come from upper-middle/upper class families
anyway and may never have held a manual labor position in their lives).

------
namank
TLDR?

~~~
jodrellblank
Hard work builds character.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Work harder, and faster.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Don't sweat details that don't matter.

It doesn't matter how hard you work if you aren't getting the work done. You
don't get points for trying.

Practising ambidextrous cutlery sorting increases proficiency at ambidextrous
cutlery sorting ( <http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1991/01/19> ).

So many common TLDRs of this story template.

