I spent an hour and a half last night at work cleaning the expo line at work for $2.13/hour.  For anyone who hasn't worked in a restaurant, here's the deal:  in addition to their tables, servers are each responsible for designated sidework (to be done at the beginning and end of your shift as well as throughout).  This is how we continue to have glassware, lemon wedges, and ketchup available for our guests.  My sidework last night was to keep the area where the food is garnished stocked during the shift, then clean it at the end of the night.  The last part involves taking twenty-something pans of sauces and other similar items and switching them to clean pans without any waste, then wiping down any mess that may have occurred in that area-- which is usually quite a lot--and sweeping all the stray french fries off the floor.  
    It is common practice among restaurant employees to shortcut their sidework as much as they can possibly get away with in order to go out drinking as fast as they can.  I unfortunately suffer from an affliction:  I believe that, no matter what I do for a living,  my work is a reflection of me.  So I am incapable of doing this and being discovered to be a lazy, manipulative sham of a human being.  So I engross myself in my task of the day.  Several servers commented on how thorough I was being.  Maybe at some point I should have realized that I could have called it good and gotten out of there at a reasonable time.  For some reason, doing that would have caused me to have difficulty sleeping.  
    I operate on a pretty basic principle for this particular obsession:  I get very angry when I discover something that someone else has very blatantly pushed under the rug.  So I can't do it to other people.  There have to be plenty of people in this world who operate the way I do; I just don't come across very many of them in my particular field.  So people tend to look at me like I'm crazy... but I can live with crazy a whole lot better than I can live with shady.

CL