There is nothing I can think to say about dishwashing that would say to the reader, This is the epitome of being a dishwasher. It simply is what it is, dishwashing. Six dollars and fifty cents per hour(Bend,OR) of hot water, steam, and broken plates. Sane people do not feel nostalgia for dishwashing memories. If memory serves, my dishwashing experience was a full load of smashed cold French fries and cigarettes extinguished in ketchup. Rubber gloves that inflate underwater and fill with hot stagnant air that makes your hands smell like a rank foot. A kind of water torture. Black rubber mats and that brownish reddish grease coated tile that no amount of scrubbing or mopping could steal. And the goddamn fluorescent lights and burnt coffee for breaktime. Antianecdote no.1- The waitresses here at the steakhouse are veterans. Well into the second halves of their lives. Large glasses and extra long Old Golds and Virginia Slim extra longs with large manicured fake fingernails and hair dyed red and pushed into some sort of bouffant. It is every young waitresses nightmare to work with women like this not because they are not nice people, they were, but because they are a constant reminder of passing time and occupation. The owner was an ex police officer or perhaps sheriff. He liked to eat at his own restaurant a lot and would order the chef specials most often, but not before drinking a pot of truck stop burnt coffee for a few hours, inspecting the restaurant’s performance or not I couldn’t really tell, mainly it seemed like his wife was sick of cooking for him so he had to open a restaurant. He was partial to wearing brown bootleg stretchpants with gray pointy-toed cowboy boots. These boots had no traction as was demonstrated on occasion when walking by the dishwashing machine. There was something completely hilarious about watching a stretchpantsed bootleg pointy cowboy boots ex sheriff sprawl and wheel across the kitchen like some kind of anarchistic ballet or fangled opera disaster with everyone standing around with deer in the headlights faces. Introducing the line cooks and chefs. An assorted hierarchy of ego and sauté, some still living in the town where they went to high school. Others transient ski bums and "its all good" bros. One of the chefs had an amazing system of covert operations in order to smoke reefer while he cooked without the patrons or waitresses catching an eye. It required an inhalation, then hold breath until face becomes even more red than red under the orange plate warming lights, then exhalation into the microwave, then shut the door of the microwave and vent the steam, then wave an incense stick around over the sauté. More steam, more fire, more water, more grease. Steel wool, vinyl apron with brown synthetic fur on the back like the hide of swine. If lucky near the end of night when only the kitchen trays, aluminum, mixing bowls, spatulas, crusted, heated for 8 hours mashed potatoes, old cream sauté crust, mixing bowl apparati mixing arms, pastry bags filled with cold mashed potatoes, I would get to take a break and eat something into a tightened stomach, and maybe have a cigarette.