Success (Sort of)

Remember The Earle? I got it together and called back. Then a few weeks later someone from their other location called and said they needed someone a few days a week for the holiday season. I interviewed again and got the job.

You always know from the interview, don't you? If you're going to get the job the interview feels like a formality. Of course they'll hire me. It's like when you know a girl likes you. Even if it's the first hint of affection you've seen in months, you get cocky and start messing with her, just to see how much you can get away with. Maybe writing in second person was a bad choice. Maybe I'm the only one who does that.

Is this the end of Jobless? Ha! I dropped the pretense of writing exclusively about my job search weeks ago. I've found a way to to reconstitute my idle thoughts as something that matters, and I don't plan on giving that up.

After working three days, I know two things: 1. I'm happy to have a job; 2. The restaurant business is not for me in the long run.

It will work for a few months, but the truth is I'm out of my element. Make no mistake: restaurant cooking is hard, manual labor. It's one of the few businesses where every day is expected to be, is designed to be, a crisis. At a busy restaurant, every day you go to work you know that you'll have at least a few minutes (and sometimes a few hours) when you're overwhelmed, exhausted, sweating, and struggling to keep up.

Line cooking is not about creativity. It's not about daintily sprinkling parsley just so. It's about performing the same tasks over and over with extreme speed and consistency. It's closer to playing a sport than to working a desk job. Some of the best line cooks don't really care about food. They just love the adrenaline rush and can amp themselves up to work hard and fast for six hours.

It's a weird crowd. Cooking does not require any specialized knowledge that can't be learned on the job. Because of this, and the strange hours, and the leeway you have with your personal appearance, the restaurant business attracts a rogue's gallery of characters who couldn't hack it in any other real-life arena.

You meet some interesting people. Like Froilan, the sous chef who got drunk and put me in a head lock and pretended (it turned out) to knife me, but the next night was poring over a 1500-page dessert book, because the pastry chef quit and he had to learn how to make all the desserts. Or the dishwasher, who introduced himself as "Martin, like Martin Luther King, Jr.," a tank of a man who can carry a fifty-pound stack of red hot saute pans down the line without ever dropping them and reminisces about the 60s, "when people were nicer to each other."

Am I one of them? I don't think so. Some day I will have to find a job that values thinking, something quieter. But for now it's okay. It's hard to argue when they pay you.