What I Learned From My First Job

I was sixteen when I got my first job, and I thought I was too clever for it.

The restaurant was called The Copper Pot. It had forty tables, a chef who sang old film songs while he cooked, and a dishwashing station at the back that smelled of steam, lemon soap and burnt garlic. That station was mine, five evenings a week, for the whole summer.

I'd taken the job for the money. I wanted a second-hand bicycle, the blue one in the window of the shop near the bridge. In my head the job was only a way of getting the bike. I didn't expect to learn anything.

The first night

On my first night I broke two glasses, flooded the floor and stacked the plates so badly that a tower of them slid into the sink with a crash that stopped the whole kitchen.

Everyone looked at me. My face burned.

Then the chef, Mr Okafor, laughed, a big warm laugh, and went back to singing. A waiter called Divya handed me a mop without a word. Nobody made me feel small. I was grateful, and I was also determined never to feel that way again.

Lesson one: the invisible job holds everything up

In my second week I began to notice something. When I was slow, everything slowed down. The cooks ran out of pans and the waiters ran out of plates. Orders backed up, food went cold and customers waited.

When I was fast and careful, nobody noticed me at all. Everything just worked.

That was the first thing the job taught me. The jobs nobody sees are often the ones holding everything else up. I started to look differently at the cleaners at my school, at the man who emptied the bins on our street and at the woman who stacked the shelves in the corner shop. I had walked past them all my life without really seeing them.

Lesson two: pride doesn't depend on the job

Mr Okafor had a rule. Every plate that left his kitchen had to be one he would be proud to eat from himself. That included the plates I washed.

At first I thought it was a bit silly. A clean plate was a clean plate. But one evening he held one up to the light and showed me a faint streak of grease along the rim that I'd missed.

"A customer will never tell you about this," he said. "They just won't come back."

After that I started to care. I built a system: glasses first, then cutlery, then plates, then the heavy pans last. I timed myself. I got quicker without getting sloppier. By August I could clear a full rush without a single plate coming back.

Nobody gave me a prize for it. I didn't need one. For the first time I understood what it felt like to be proud of work that was entirely mine.

Lesson three: how you treat people is the job

The person who taught me most was Divya. She had been waiting tables for six years while studying for her nursing exams at night. She was tired a lot of the time, but she was never short with anyone. That went for customers, cooks and me.

One night a customer shouted at her about a dish that wasn't her fault. She listened, apologised, fixed it, and then came back into the kitchen and quietly asked Mr Okafor whether the cook who had made the mistake was all right, because he'd seemed upset earlier.

I asked her later how she stayed so calm.

She shrugged. "Everyone in here is having a long day," she said. "I can't fix that. I can just try not to make it worse."

I've thought about that sentence more than almost anything a teacher ever said to me.

The bicycle

At the end of the summer I bought the blue bicycle. I rode it for years, and I loved it.

But it's funny. When I think about that summer now, I hardly think about the bike at all. I think about the steam and the singing, the stack of plates I finally got right and a tired student nurse who chose kindness at the end of a twelve-hour shift.

I went into that kitchen thinking I was too clever for the job. I came out understanding that no job was beneath me, and that being good at something small is the beginning of being good at anything.