Let's try this again...

No, I'm not alluding to a famous quote from Daffy Duck. (Do you want to shoot him here, or wait till you get home?)

I'm saying this because my wife has gone to an online ticket re-seller and purchased us 2 nosebleed seats to see Genesis at Madison Square Garden Tuesday night. (I like how on Futurama, they have Madison Cube Garden.)

Anyways, Suldog is promising a story from his life as a dishwasher. But while he stalls, I've got my own story as one.

In college I worked for dining services, and was a really good worker in the dishroom. I sometimes would do the 4:30 to 7 shift -- early dinner -- a lot of putting away the last of the dishes run from lunch, and clearing the crap from trays of early eaters. We had a pretty big industrial dishwashing machine in there. It was a twenty-foot conveyer belt on which you could load the plates and stuff....two foot square racks for silverware...wire frames for drinking glasses...or you could also put giant roasting pans on there from the kitchen itself. Sort of like a big automatic car wash that you drive into.

There was a steady crew of 3-4 "townies" who worked full time in the dishroom, along with a crew of 2-3 students. My friend Brunel and I were working one night, along with the only young townie on the crew. A guy named Danny....probably about 20....maybe he finished high school, not even sure. He was an all right guy. Once we discussed the operations of the conveyer belt....could one ride it from beginning to end? Perhaps, if we turned off the spray hoses. Well, we talked Danny into going for a ride, and he certainly seemed up for it. He knew the machine itself better than we did, so he had turned off the spray hoses. He turned on the conveyer belt and crawled on.

So he's going along at the leisurely pace of the belt...it would take a minute or so, I guess from entering the washing tank to the exit. And he was fine, since the sprays weren't on. One problem, right at the end. He didn't turn off the water at the rinse bar. This was not only the last shot of water the dishes would get, but it was the hottest. I think we were told 180 degrees (F). So we hear him scream and start scurrying down the belt to get out of the tank. So he's not only soaking wet, he's burned. Second-degree burns, if I remember correctly. I think the top layer of skin was bright pink and peeling.

So sure enough, Danny was fired after that night. The funny part of the story was that there was a section outside the dishroom, where the line for students would form, where people could put "napkin notes" -- informal suggestions for specific cold cereal, or "fewer pot roast nights" or whatever. We thought it would be cute to put an anonymous note up there asking for Danny to be reinstated. A couple of days later our napkin note was responded to (right on the napkin, actually). Something to the effect of, the risk that our friend Danny posed to both himself, and the machinery, made it so that he would not be appointed back to his position.

And so we never saw him again. But the tale has lived on for years in what we'd call "dishroom lore." In the same way songs by Winger and the Cult were known as "dishroom music" for their popularity around 1989.