Never saw anything this cool while working at AJ's

I spent a lot of time in high school and college working in a restaurant. One of my first jobs was at AJ's Restaurant & Lounge. I got hired to wash dishes and later became a prep cook and host.

It was pretty much the best job ever. The schedule was extremely flexible. I earned 10 varsity letters in high school and was a three-sport athlete my last three years of school. During the school year I'd only work weekends. There were seasons where I'd hand the manager a long list of days I couldn't work due to wrestling or track meets and I would be scheduled to show up pretty much on Sundays only.

When I did show up, the work was extremely easy and mostly fun. I washed dishes. Do you have any idea how easy that is? See those dishes in the bus tub? Take them out, put them on a rack, spray them off, load them in the dishwasher, wait two minutes for them to come out clean (and get the next rack ready in that time), then put them away. Like that's the whole job.

Prepping was even easier. See the salad bar? Keep it full of food. When one container becomes empty, fill it up. Got it? Got it. The hardest part of the job was not getting caught eating pickles out of the five-gallon bucket in the walk-in.

Hosting was awesome because you got to talk to customers and show them where to sit, then take their money. After the state made smoking in restaurants illegal, the job became even easier because you didn't have to worry about which section you sat customers in. (You did still have to worry about servers being upset that they weren't getting seated how they felt they should be.)

I tried to make this job fun by giving out random safety tips, which weren't always appreciated by the customers (like "don't drink bleach"), and updating the feature/special board to include honest descriptions of the food, which wasn't always appreciated by management ("try the steak... it's mad cow free").

I pretty much worked at AJ's during the last two years of high school and the summers between college. (And I got a raise at the beginning of every summer, which I always appreciated.) That's a lot of time to spend in a restaurant. That's a lot of time to get bored in the back of a restaurant. Bored high school and college kids pull a lot of shenanigans. But none of our shenanigans were ever as cool as this: