You spot an overladen cheese pizza draped across the pizza bar, surrounded by a cloud of minute fat particles.
You evaluate the proffered vegetables with a gimlet eye, elbow your way through the discontented masses, and finally emerge to take your place in the dining area.
After the meal, you surrender your silverware and plates to the conveyor belt. The plates clatter slowly, inexorably back into the dish room, a hinterland of questionable hygiene.
We all love to hate Saga.
I work there.
As an employee, I have noticed that the griping about Saga translates into a subtle distaste for the workers. Friends raise an eyebrow upon learning of your employment. Acquaintances curtly smile recognition before moving away posthaste.
I get it, I really do. A job in food service does not require much more than a pulse and a room-temperature IQ. Landing the job is not a prestigious or even a difficult thing to do. Working there does little for your resume, assuming you are — like so many Hillsdale students — gunning for a top spot in the bureaucratic machinery of D.C.
But the attitude that a ‘low-end’ job reflects directly on the quality of the person employed forces me to ask: when did we all decide that the job defines the person? What gives anyone the notion that they have a right to look down on someone else because of how that person happens to earn their livelihood?
I don’t sprout extra digits or lose teeth when I don the universal apron and gloves of food service. My intelligence level, believe it or not, is the same before and after I punch in.
I take pride in my work. Not because of what I do, but how I do it. I am an employee for a reason: they need me to work. Not only do they need me to work, but they need me to work effectively in order to make a profit and continue providing a service.
Saga provides an essential service. It feeds nearly everyone on campus three times a day, six days a week. Up to 1,100 students file past Saga Steve in the course of an average lunch shift. Employees shuttle around incessantly to keep the cafeteria clean and operable. The prep crew works for hours to get one meal coordinated and ready to serve. The employees on duty during the shift make sure that the food is fresh, up to quality standards, and readily available. More workers file out after the meal to scrub tables, cleaning up the often-unsavory remains of more than 1,000 meals.
There is a dignity even to undignified work. Manual labor is honest; there is no pretension, no ambition. Incompetence is incompetence, no matter how suave or articulate you might be. Only by learning your job and learning it well can you gain approbation or advancement.
This is Hillsdale, foremost advocate of hard-working capitalist enterprise — the last bastion of free markets, bald eagles, and the Western tradition!
And as Hillsdale students, we all become duly familiar with the fabled Protestant work ethic in our freshman history classes.
Let’s apply it, shall we?
