Some New Guys at Work

At my night job we have some new gentleman who've been hired to work in the dish-pit. This is a good and necessary thing, as many similar places I've worked are usually staffed with workers of Latino descent, but with the tight standards that this corporate establishment follows, we're unable to make similar hires. Up to now we've been running with hipsters, kids of general affluence or of considerable weed-smoking habits, any of which make them rather lame in the dish-pit.

Now we've discovered a pipeline to more possible workers whose papers will all be in order. We have three at night and one in the morning. They are excellent at the work, which I'd imagine is insulting and easy for them, but they happily slog through it like masters. They usually finish before my line guys and stand around staring quizzically, saying with their eyes, "What's taking you children of privilege so long?"

Sometimes I worry about their families, and hope they're all right. Once, one of them came to me, (all three I work with regularly are all very humble and nice) and told me with a big smile in passable English, "We like you, because, you are nice to us." They've even shared their food with me during Ramadan.

They're Iraqi refugees.

The gentleman from the morning brought in a magazine with a picture of himself in fatigues and battle gear working alongside a infantryman from Louisiana. His papers had come through, luckily, when so many others face long odds. That is one of the many sad consequences of this exercise of choice out in the desert--Iraqi refugees apply by the hundreds-of-thousands for asylum here in the States, as well as the UK and other EU nations, and are routinely turned down. That practice has been happening for many years, even before March of 2003, but the fact that it's still and/or currently difficult?

Of my night guys from Bagdad, one was a professor, one worked as a cook or chef, but mainly, it sounds like, in Istanbul or Ankara, and the other, the joker, hasn't really talked about it.

I guess hiring a bunch of folks like me--overqualified--will make any business run smoothly.