Fun At Work: Building Dish Structures

Working as a dishwasher in a kitchen can be very boring. If there aren't any events going on and the restaurant is dead then there really isn't much to do if all the dishes are done, the garbages are taken out and the floors are swept and mopped.

It can also get really irritating to come into work and find piles of ill-arranged dishes taking up way too much space. The worst of these is finding a tower of plates stacked precariously on top of smaller plates, bowls, cups or creamers. I've written on here before that is taking these monstrosities down is akin to dismantling a nuclear bomb.

I started pointing these out to my friends Brandon and Mike and we all had a laugh at the laziness and stupidity that went into making them. So naturally, we took it as a challenge and started making our own beautiful dish structures.

Behold!

I call this one Silver Boxy.

It's made up of different
sized hotel pans, a metal
tong and a plate cover.

I built the main structure
and placed the metal
tong on top as a sort of
antenna. Otherwise the
structure would be some-
what bland.

When I showed it to
Brandon he completed it
by putting the plate cover
on top.



This one is all me however,
and I call it Monolith.

As you can see, it's made
of a whole lot of plate
covers and one load
bearing metal milkshake
cup.

I couldn't leave it up very
long because even though
it was structurally sound,
I didn't want to imagine
the kind of sound it would
have made if it had
fallen over.

It's simple and non-func-
tional :)


This one was made last
night and it caught me by
surprise.

I was washing plates from
a banquet when suddenly
I saw this standing there.

I had been the only one in
the kitchen for at least five
minutes, and I hadn't left
the dishpit in those five
minutes.

So, it was a stealth build.
A very impressive one at
that.

It's composed of a creamer,
a dinner plate, plastic tongs, some weird hourglass looking metal thing, a bowl, and an
empty coffee creamer cup. The bowl and the cup were added afterward, but they really
completed the piece. I dubbed it Future Modern.

And now, what I consider to be my ultimate creation in the field of creative dish stacking (though it really belongs in the sub-field of applied artistic dish stacking (there are four sub-fields so far)):

The Bloom
It consists of a caraffe, a round, dinner plates, small bowls, small metal bowls, and as is usually present in most creations, a plate cover.

It started out simple enough and with experimentation and balance it eventually morphed into what you see before you.

I showed it off to everybody in the kitchen and they all loved it.

What's funny is Mike tried to knock it over by throwing a wet towel at it.

Emphasis on the 'tried.'

No matter how many times he threw the towel he would always miss. I declared that the awesomeness of the structure had resulted in the creation of a force field. The picture really doesn't convey how cool this thing was. I'm just glad I got a picture of it before I had to take it down.

I'm really proud of the creations my friends and I come up with at work. We have some ideas in mind for future projects, such as building a bridge across the dishpit or just making something so ridiculously huge that if it were to fall over... well, it's best not to jinx it.