My first job in the US

My first job interview was in a small narrow corridor with 20 others waiting in line to fill up the 4 openings! It was for a the catering department at UTA. I got the job and was offered some 5$ an hour and was promised up-to 20 hours of work per week.

The job included counting clean spoons, forks, knives, dessert forks, glasses for water; folding napkins; laying plates on tables; filling ice into glasses (which I was banned from doing after I broke 2 glasses in 2 ice drums and had to dump all the ice out of the drums since glass and ice look alike!); serving water; refilling ice tea; making ice tea; serving dessert.

I didn't make a whole lot of money since there weren't a whole lot of parties and the catering services didn't have many jobs. I did learn about some of the good things in life – Italian cream cake/ Cheese cake/ Carrot cake and a lot of fancy decorated plates of food.

My friends would wait for me to come home after work since I could take home as much food as was left over. If there was a party planed for 45 people and only 42 showed up, there would be 3 extra plates. There would be maybe 8 of us who helped serve, so there would be a total of 11 plates made for us. Some of the people would not wait till the end, so there would be more than 1, sometime 4 plates for me and we would all share and eat the good food in the apartment.

My boss was Chris, a hyper active white guy, who was always running around the place. Margaret was a sweet old lady who would offer to get my white dress shirt washed and ironed after a long shift catering a party. There were a couple of big ladies in the fruit section, who would always be singing and making fun of all the folks who happened to enter their section. There was another Chris, who was an angry black dude, who, after a while, I found out was a really sweet guy. He had worked in the catering department for a long time and was frustrated with the newbies like us who would screw up on the job and he would have to fix the mistakes we made! He was an extremely funny guy though and he would imitate people from different countries so well – Chineese/ Indian/ Middle eastern/ Russia and did it so well with an accent as well. UTA was a school that had a lot of people from all over the world, so I guess he got a chance to interact with them all.

I think one of the things I realized working in the catering department was that it was ok to do any kind of work in the US. Most middle class people in India would NOT work at a restaurant waiting tables, but in the US it was totally accepted. It was nice to know that my family was also ok with me working here and I think that they felt that it will help me grow as well. I learnt to interact with people from a different country, learnt a new job and learned to do it well, learnt etiquette and a little bit about food as well.

I really did enjoy the experience of working at Aramark, the catering team at UTA.