Worktime Woes

Ashley Peterson
2 min readMay 15, 2022

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Before college and my temporary DoorDash stint, I worked at my local Dairy Queen for almost two years. It certainly wasn’t my favorite position, but I had really good managers and a great boss, so it could have been worse. Over my time there I worked in the front, the drive-through, soft serve, and the grill. I learned many useless skills, as well as many important ones during those two years.

The one job I was never trained in was dishes. My theory is that the reason why is because, while I wasn’t a bad worker, I was a hazard to myself and others. Throughout the years, multiple people cut themselves washing dishes and I’m pretty sure my boss was certain that I would be the one to lose my entire finger.

His fears weren’t exactly unfounded. Just within my first few weeks of working, I fell multiple times. One particular time I was walking past the sink to come back from break. The guy washing dishes at the time was one who was notorious for getting so much water on the floor, it was like he was trying to create a new lake. I slid hard, sideways, so I landed squarely on the side of my hip. I hit the ground with such force they could hear it in the grill section and came to check on me. After that, my boss placed an order for me to get some non-slip shoes even though I was supposed to ait six months.

Falling wasn’t my only problem. I also had a tendency to knock various things over throughout the restaurant. I once was sweeping and knocked a glass decoration over, so it shattered all over the floor. Not only that, there were multiple instances where I spilled toppings in the soft serve section. Sadly my plan of slowly bankrupting the restaurant one sprinkle jar at a time did not succeed.

Fortunately for me and my workplace, I never actually received any serious injuries. Mostly I just came out of work a mess, with numerous bruises, scrapes, and cuts. It’s a good thing I’m planning on becoming a professor because if I stayed in the restaurant industry I might not make it past 30.

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