Dish washing USED to be brutal, you scrape, you hose, you place. when the washer is full, you start.
Smoke a cigarette, flirt with the waitress, start when the sink is half full, rinse repeat. no brainer! he's just lazy!
When I washed dishes in college, we had an assembly line, similar to what you described. The dishes were heavy duty restaurant type ceramic dishes.
People would put their trays at a window, an open space, when they were finished eating.
Scrapers and stackers--there would be two people there, scraping the dirty dishes and stacking like kinds together.
Next were people who loaded the racks with dishes to be washed.
Racks were pushed over to the sprayer. This person who was spraying, sprayed the bulk of the food off the dishes. This person was also considered the dishwashing room supervisor. I had this job as a sophmore in college. The nun who was the head of the lunchroom asked me to be the supervisor for the year. She must have trusted me. I also had to report any problems we had to her. We didn't really have any because we tried to have fun and make it an enjoyable experience, as much as possible. I liked that nun and had forgotten about her until now. She was good to me, and maybe knew my background, being orphaned. I spent my share of time during meals being close to her, while making toast for breakfast, etc. A friend of mine and I were sponsored, scholarship students, by a Catholic priest and we met many of the nuns before starting school there. It was a hot, sweaty job. This job caused me to often take more than one shower a day. I remember a day when I spent hours in the cafeteria, first making toast for breakfast, then scraping and stacking, later, at other meals, as sprayer. It was a hot and miserable day and I took 5 showers that day.
Dish racks were pushed through an enclosed washing machine set up where they were additionally cleaning and also sanitized. Each rack that went through pushed the previous ones out. The last racks that went through were empty, to clear out.
Dish racks came out of the machine and were left for a minute or so to drip and dry from the heat. Then they were stacked onto rolling carts and rolled back to the serving area for future use. The people emptying the dishes had to keep taking those racks back to the loaders, back and forth. They had to walk by the sprayer, who might accidentally spray them. I know I did more than once as the sprayer.
I'll bet I'm not the only person who has worked on a dish washing crew like this!
