There comes a time when you just have to get out there and do something about unemployment. If I want to get out of Israel, it has to start somehow and with something.

It’s not that easy, though. I started aiming moderately high: a print shop, Mac guru, some degree of a sales rep. That was no good, I went searching lower. In the, let’s say, hospitality business.

So I go to this place, Aroma it’s called. Café á la Starbucks if you will, it’s that kinda joint. You see it in the way it runs, the way it handles, it’s just how it is.

So I walk up to the “bar” and ask if they need anyone. One girl, about eighteen years old or so I judge. Her face caked with some twisted inexperienced expression that made me want to kill her, pointing towards another girl, around her age, with a name tag just like hers except with the words “shift m.”

Great, I thought. I’m dealing with teenage girls.

Little Miss Shift Manager colloquially instructs me to sit somewhere and that in five to ten minutes’ time she’ll be there to interview me. Sure enough, I sat and she arrives with a blank clipboard and a pen.

“Your name is?”
I told her. She wrote it down. She spelled it right, too.
“So, do you know what work is like in here?”
I thought this for some time. I felt like saying “in shifts” or, “you serve coffee”, but that wouldn’t have been the proper answer. I tried to look decent, placed my hands on the table, looked straight at her and said, “I’m not sure I do, maybe you could tell me.”
“You start out as a cleaning person. You roll that trolley around, the one you’ve probably seen. You represent us, no one else does, we’re all behind the bar otherwise. It’s not that great, you need to touch garbage and other people’s food. After some time you progress to the next rank, in which you do slightly better things.”
I nodded at her.
“Washing dishes. And after some time later you progress to prepare food in the kitchen. And lastly, you will arrive at the bar, as the last rank.”

I imagined some kind of hierarchy, or tried to. Looking back and forth between the bar and her, it seemed even stranger. I gave a glance to someone with the trolley she spoke of.

Never have I imagined this sort of thing could actually be there. It never occurred to me that walking around with a trolley is worse than doing the dishes, but it’s very interesting regardless. Some vaguely enlightening experience.

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