Cleaning the Dishes and Other Things

At the age of 14, I started working for pay for the first time at the Boy Scout Camp as a kitchen helper, where we fed 300 people per meal.  One of my main duties was washing the dishes, and sometimes the auto dishwasher worked and sometimes it didn’t.   Dishwasher or potato peeler, I put in eleven-hour days with just a short few-hour break in the afternoon.  In today’s world, you have to be 16 years old and only work 8 hours a day with mandatory breaks in-between.  Huh? 

In High School I worked part time washing dishes for a local restaurant and in college I washed dishes full time in the summer for various restaurants.  My first and only summer back from Dental School, I washed pots and pans at a local hospital and some of the pots were large enough to climb inside of.  Cleaning large cookie sheets filled with baked on bacon grease was not the highlight of my work days.

These days, I still find myself elbow deep in the cleaning business.  I may not be cleaning pots and pans anymore, but I’m still washing and sterilizing our dental instruments and everything else that touches the patient.  This has to be done to stop cross contamination between our patients, and if something can’t be cleaned then we throw it away.

Our tireless efforts to frequently clean and sterilize everything, stops the cross contamination of bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites, which are the root causes of so many diseases including SARS II (COVID-19).  We’ve been doing these prevention activities for decades and we assure you that no one has contracted diseases because of a visit to our office.  Heck, we even sterilize the water with Ozone!

Funny how few things change in one’s life?  Cleaned yesterday, be cleaning today, and will clean tomorrow.