Back in the day – by which I mean “back in college” – I spent a large portion of my week working in a dining hall. It wasn’t so bad, really. I met a lot of friends, we threw a lot of parties and I made quite a bit of money as I climbed my way up the dining hall leadership ladder to student management.
By design, I worked most of my shifts in the dishroom. If you’ve never seen an industrial dishwashing facility, you don’t want to, I promise. It was hot, filthy, wet and perpetually moldy. If you walked into the room, even for a second, you would end up covered in a film of soggy, pulverized food. It was great, I swear.
Truth be told, I liked the noise, the limited customer interaction and opportunity to wear shoes with no socks all the time. It wasn’t so bad and we got to eat a lot of pizza. Sort of.
Technically, we got to “throw away” a large quantity of pizza that was left over at the end of the night. The pizza appeared on top of the dish machine at the end of the night and we were supposed to put it down the disposal. Every once in awhile, management would crack down on our thieving ways and watch us throw the pizza down the disposal, but there were usually 10+ pizzas left.
In hindsight, the amount of pizza and dish-crud that I consumed over the course of my college career is pretty appalling. It’s a miracle that I didn’t die of something weird.
Taking Back Pizza
Fortunately or unfortunately, my husband does not have the same fond memories of the dishroom and all the pizza we consumed. Some might say that he found the whole experience disturbing and disgusting. It’s okay though, because we made some new pizza-related memories yesterday – with pizza from scratch!
*We can debate about whether eating pizza destined for the garbage disposal constitutes “theft” all day, if you want.
*If you type the word “pizza” as many times as I did to write this post, you start to think you’re spelling it wrong.