A couple of months ago, right after my first son was born, I thought about the lessons I wanted to pass along to him that I had learned a little late in life. Among the morals I scribbled down in my mind, one that stood out began with a story involving Steve Jobs and ended with the serving of my mother's last meal.
The Jobs portion of the story occurred in 2010, when he was sitting with a mutual friend in the restaurant in San Francisco. The waitress, according to the friend, approached them and asked what they wanted for breakfast. Jobs said he wanted freshly squeezed orange juice.
After a few minutes, the waitress returned with a large glass of juice. Jobs took a tiny sip and told her tersely that the drink was not freshly squeezed. He sent the beverage back, demanding another.
The waitress returned with another glass of juice, this time freshly squeezed. When he took a sip he told her in an aggressive tone that the drink had pulp along the top. He sent that one back, too.
My friend said he looked at Jobs and asked, “Steve, why are you being such a jerk?” Jobs replied that if the woman had chosen waitressing as her vocation, “then she should be the best”.
Hearing this story, I was immediately put off by how Jobs had acted; he was being – to borrow from his breakfast companion – a jerk. But looking past his rudeness, I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind – no matter what you do for a living, should you do the best work possible?
Of course, this question breaks down a bit when a job is just a job; it’s not your vocation. It can be especially disheartening when you don’t believe that what you’re doing for a living is appreciated or that it is having very little impact on other people’s lives.
I get it. I was a waiter for many years. I was a line cook. I worked in the garment district in New York City carrying spools of fabric between warehouses. I worked in a salon washing women’s hair.
And yet it wasn’t until my mother found out that she had terminal cancer in mid-March and was given a prognosis of only two weeks to live that I learned even if a job is just a job, you can still have a profound impact on someone else’s life. You just may not know it.
My mother loved shrimp. She would eat them in a grimy airport cafe or a five-star restaurant. And when she was done, she always beamed a big smile and, in her posh British accent, said, “Oh, that was just lovely.”
My mother was the one who taught me how to cook shrimp – and everything else. So I jumped at the chance to become her personal chef for the last two weeks of her life. When she asked for some vegetables to nibble on, I fastidiously julienned a cucumber into thin slices, layering them atop one another in a semicircle.
When she asked for a pita and hummus, I cut the bread into perfect little triangles, found elegant small bowls in her cupboards and carefully quenelled three dipping options. I proudly took every meal to her on her finest china, placed on an ornate tray and finished off with a single English flower. As the days went by, her appetite started to wane, as did her mind. The meals she asked for grew smaller and smaller. Then she stopped eating altogether. We all knew the end was near.
Then one evening my mother became incredibly lucid and called for me. She was craving shrimp, she said. "I'm on it," I told her. The problem was, I didn't have any. So I called for takeout. From my mother's house in Leeds, England, the closest place was Sukhothai, a tiny nondescript Thai restaurant a few miles away.
The restaurant was bustling. In the open kitchen in the back, I could see a dozen men and women frantically slaving over the hot stoves and dishwashers, with busboys and waiters rushing in and out.
I watched all these people toiling away, and I thought about what Jobs had said about the waitress from a few years earlier. Though his rudeness may have been uncalled for, there was something to be said for the idea that we should do our best at whatever job we take on.
This should be the case, not because someone else expects it. Rather, as I want to teach my son, we should do it because our jobs, no matter how seemingly small, can have a profound effect on someone else’s life; we just don’t often get to see how we’re touching them.
Certainly, the men and women who worked at that little Thai restaurant didn't know that when they went into work that evening, they would have the privilege of cooking someone's last meal.It was a meal that I would unwrap in my mother's kitchen, carefully plucking four shrimp from the box and laying them out on one of her ornate china plates before taking it to her room. It was a meal that would end with my mother smiling for the last time before slipping away from consciousness and saying, "Oh, that was just lovely." Lucy Kellaway is away – ( New York Times service)
