New job starts tomorrow.

PPE that'll double up for the day job?

I did that for a few months while at college twenty-EEK! years ago.

Should be ok if you get very decent staff discount.

My little experience 50 years was that the job was much as George Orwell described it in "Down And Out In Paris and London":

"...offers no prospects, is intensely exhausting and at the same time has not a trace of skill or interest ...A plongeur is one of the slaves of the modern world...His work is servile and without art."

But look on the bright side, at least you're not going as an

Lol, that would be justice.

NT

Hmm, I had no idea you needed any training to wash pots, just shove them into the industrial sized dishwasher......:-)

Who recalls the one armed dishwasher in robin's Nest on the telly all those years ago.

Brian

Brian-Gaff has brought this to us :

I do, he actually had two arms, he was also in Faulty Towers as an Irish builder.

Well, nearly 40 years ago, you did have to be trained in London before you could do commercial washing up. It mainly related to hygine, e.g. not drying things with cloths unless you take a newly cleaned one or a disposable one each time (never allowed to hang them up to dry and reuse), must use brushes and never cloths or sponges to wash the dishes, mush rinse in running water, etc.

At the time, this was just a requirement in London, but I thought it had gone country-wide since then.

Now I was taught that you did not need to rinse in running water (although we had 3 sinks system) but there was a minimum temperature for the rinse sink (the third sink). The second sink was the sterilisation sink.

Anyway it will be fun.

Here we are - better late than never - some pictures that Adam asked me to post but there was a delay for some reason and, when they did finally arrive, I was away from the PC for a while ...

I was originally going to give this the sub-heading ' Adam getting his hands clean for a change' but, having seen them, perhaps not ...

what's the significance of the photo of some garage doors/gate

My irst job was to look at why the lights were on.

and was anybody home?

I did this job for three reasons.

1. If I had not done it the gf would have lost a days work as the kitchen would have closed
2. A bit of an experiment. I wanted to see what it was like again being on the bottom rung.
3. Terry knows and your guess would probably be correct.

What a day. 8 hours of hard work. Although sometimes I do more physically demanding stuff at my normal job.

Sunday is carvery. Normally there would be two chefs, a kitchen porter/catering assistant, a pot washer and two front of house staff.

Here is what we had - my gf Lou who is normally the KP became the only chef for the day, I did the pot washer's job and some of the KP's job, the front of house staff were replaced by the temp manager and his partner (who have only been there 3 days) and they also had to assist me with the KP's job and between them they served the carvery which would be the second chefs job. We also had the temp managers mother giving us a hand.

And we pulled it off. 119 meals served in 6 hours and no complaints.

What did I get paid for it? I was paid the minimum wage. So that's £60 before any deductions (a quick check says that the £7.50 per hour minimum wage on a 40 hour week after deductions gives you a weekly take home pay of £264.91).

Of course I worked a Sunday, I would normally get paid double for working on a Sunday. Although I don't get paid holidays.

However my stress levels were low (it was a braindead job). Tomorrow I'll be running a £1.5M project and I will be stressed.

So after doing one days work at the minimum wage do I believe that £7.50 ph is enough? Well I know in this case I did one and a half jobs and the half a job I did is paid above the minimum wage but yes I'll have to say the £7.50 is about right.

Some people want to raise the minimum wage. Well one man's wage increase is another man's price increase. I charged them £20 to fix the outside lights. That was £8 in parts and 10 minutes work. I would have charged more if I was not already at the place to wash the pots.

That was interesting, and led me to ponder - if there was a kettle washer, would the pot washer call him black?

Dunno. But the sink should have been 2 inches higher.

I trust you were also fed (well - fed yourselves)!

PS

don't worry about HMRC looking over your shoulder: there's an exemption for canteen etc meals

And peolpe wonder why I think londoners are superior ;-)

One would hope so like they did with running water and electricity and cobbled streets :)

I'm just waiting for someone to post a link to ten pages of H&S rules for manual dishwashing!

:-)