Dennis Merritt shared a recent Substack post Showdown at the Pembroke Dish Room in which he wrote about a job he had in college unloading dishes in a school’s dining hall. It brought back a memory although my experience was different, especially since a dean tried to get me fired.

In my junior year at Bridgewater State College (now a university), I was hired to work in the dining hall at Tillinghast Dorm, know as Tillie. My job was in the dish room for the early morning shift, which meant I had to be there before 7 a.m. Sometimes that meant I came straight to work from a party, left a boyfriend behind in my off-campus apartment, or had pulled an all-nighter studying. My shift lasted until my first class.

But I had motivation. During the summer, I worked at a textile warehouse in New Bedford, MA, which covered most of my expenses. But I was hoping to travel to Europe. I thought I could swing it if I didn’t spend any money, except for food and rent.

As in Dennis’s experience, the dining hall had a large machine with a conveyer system. Unlike his, we used large racks to hold the contents while they were being washed. Students and faculty brought their plates, cups, and utensils to a metal counter in the dish room’s large opening. There were two of us on duty, my friend Betty and me. One of us scraped plates and loaded everything onto a rack, which then traveled through the machine. The person on the other end removed the rack and stacked it on a counter for lunch time.

The shift started slowly with the early risers, but it got very busy.

On the few days Betty couldn’t make it to work, I had the job of loading and unloading the dishwasher by myself. I had to be careful the racks didn’t back up on the end, so I was running around a lot. Frankly, the experience was rather Chaplinesque.

Then one of the college’s deans got wind that I was working in the dining hall. The woman, who shall remain nameless, wasn’t pleased about the emergence of the hippies on Bridgewater’s campus. Of course, I was one of them. So one day, she approached my boss at the dining hall. She wanted him to fire me because, get this, I was an immoral person.

I found out about it when my boss took me aside. He told the dean he wasn’t firing me because I was one of his best workers. I thanked him for backing me up.

Actually, the dean’s attempt was a big source of amusement for me. I was too immoral to scrape food off students’ plates and get them clean? Perhaps she had hoped I would fool around enough that I would get poor grades and drop out. But that didn’t happen either.

By the way, that’s a photo of me from that time. And, yes, I did save enough to travel to Europe.