The restaurant kitchen bustles with wait staff scraping plates into a waste bucket at the kitchen entrance to the dining room. Staff retrieve prepared dishes from the cooks' line about shoulder high placed under heat lamps on a silver metallic shelf while three cooks tend to stoves, ovens and grills preparing food to place on the line under heat lamps for wait staff to collect.
Florescent lighting overhead illumines the kitchen.
Staff serve dishes entering and exiting the kitchen into a chitter chatter filled dining room, as seen by a new dishwasher to the restaurant at his station peering through a square, pane-less window in a wall beside the dish machine: opposite to the cooks' line in a square room.
Not five minutes into his second shift at the restaurant as a dishwasher and at the beginning of a dinner shift around 5PM, the new dishwasher follows some wait staff and other kitchen staff who had started shifts hours earlier out of the back door by the cooks' line to smoke cigarettes.
"Five minutes into your shift and you're already going for a smoke?" a cook who had stepped out with the group of five smokers asks the dishwasher.
"Yep. Well, there are no dishes."
"Yuck! Those are some nasty feet. Do you ever clip your toe nails?" a waitress outside smoking asks.
"That's probably why I don't have a girlfriend."
"You wear sandals to work!?" another of the kitchen staff asks the dishwasher.
"Yeah. Why not?"
"Look! I have a pen with the name of a schizophrenia drug on it," the waitress who comments on the dishwasher's sandals says as she pulls a pen from her apron and passes it around to the others.
It is passed to the dishwasher who is known to have been diagnosed "schizophrenia" by random people around town due to previous mishaps which resulted in stigmatic insults and assaults on the dishwasher.
At least, the dishwasher assumes that the waitress knows that he, the dishwasher, is diagnosed with schizophrenia from gossip as he is passed the pen with the name of the drug "Zyprexa" on it.
"Richard? I want you to come in here," the manager of the restaurant calls to the dishwasher from the screen door to the back entrance of the kitchen and then disappears into the kitchen again.
Richard rises from a stool and goes inside stubbing his roll your own cigarette into a coffee can for butts outside.
Inside, Richard stands at the dishwashing station awaiting further instructions and recalls the previous shift's conversation in the kitchen on the previous night.
"He probably never worked in his life," the waitress who passes around the schizophrenia pen had said to the lead cook on the previous night.
"No. Richard has a job. He works at the university."
"He does!?"
"Yeah. Richard?"
"Yeah."
"Don't you work at the university?"
"Yeah."
"What do you do there?"
"I'm a scanner operator."
"See?" the cook had said in retort to the waitress on the previous night after which Richard finished a shift of washing dishes.
Awaiting instruction or dishes with sandals, jeans and wearing a T-shirt, Richard leans against the dish machine with arms folded and legs crossed. The waitress who had been outside smoking and handing around a pen with the name of a schizophrenia drug approaches Richard by the dish machine with the manager close behind at her heels.
"I'm sorry about what I said out there."
"Hey. No skin off my back."
The waitress looks dumbfounded to Richard by his response and she shuffles off into the din of the dining room out of the kitchen and the manager approaches Richard who stands at the dish station with his back to the pane-less window frame view into the dining room.
"You can't wear sandals to work. Here's twenty. Go home and come back tomorrow."
"Thank you. I'll be sure to come again," Richard says as he takes the twenty dollar bill and exits through the back door by the cooks' line after twenty minutes into his second shift as a dishwasher at the restaurant.
On the next day at about an hour before the dinner shift for which Richard had been scheduled, Richard phones in to the kitchen sick never to show up again.
