From: Min Seo Riu <mingymingy@umail.ucsb.edu>
To: S <s@umail.ucsb.edu>
Subject: Diner? I barely know her!
Dear S,
One of my favorite things about our friendship is that it all began on a fateful Saturday night in the Carrillo Dining Commons. What an interesting place for an email correspondence spanning across the world to begin! But then again, I can’t quite imagine us meeting anywhere else — I think Carrillo was the perfect setting for our friendship to bloom.
I’m bringing up your former workplace (and my current workplace) because I had a really nice shift today. I think it’s partly because I worked with my favorite supervisors, M and N, but also because everything was going so perfectly. (You’ll be pleased to hear that since you’ve left, M has become dish supervisor and subsequently my favorite coworker — aside from you, of course!) We had a team of five or six people, who were working in perfect harmony with each other. It was honestly sort of beautiful to witness, as plates were passed between workers, loaded and then unloaded from the dish machine, then finally transported back outside where they would undoubtedly be used and brought right back to us within 20 minutes. There was an atmosphere in that dish room that united us beyond the fact that we were all working minimum wage jobs together.
There’s something really nice about the consistency of Carrillo. I know that I’ll see the same 10 student workers for four hours a day, three times a week until one of us graduates or quits. (With the retention rate of workers lately, it’ll most likely be the latter.) And it’s always nice when a work-friend loses the hyphen and becomes just a friend, too. It doesn’t happen as frequently as I’d hope, but the friendships that do form from the dish room are ones that I hold dear to my heart.
I think this is just a really long winded way of telling you that I’m really glad that you and I became friends in the short time you were at UCSB. I think I would suffer a thousand dish shifts at Carrillo if it meant that we would always become friends.
Yours Affectionately,
Mindy
A version of this article appeared on pg. 12 of the Nov. 3, 2022 edition of the Daily Nexus.
