Too lazy. Too happy.

The dishwasher at my restaurant was fired yesterday. The strange thing was that when I asked my boss for the reasons behind the termination, he gave some seriously ambiguous answers: "He was lazy" and--though I may have misheard him--"He was too happy all the time."

As with most other dining establishments, my restaurant's kitchen staff are illegal immigrants who speak little or no English. But they get along swimmingly with each other--as well as myself and the other waitstaff, albeit mostly in body language and Spanglish--and always seem to be making the best of their rather repetitive, uninteresting work. The recently-dismissed dishwasher was the most cheerful of them all. And unless I was being particularly unobservant over the past six months, he never seemed to slack off. We go through a lot of dishes during each shift, but the clean ones always appeared in a timely fashion on the shelves for us waitresses to use. Just to make sure, I asked one of my coworkers today and she agreed with me--he'd certainly been doing his job.

I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that some event--of which I'm currently unaware--may have transpired which caused my boss to fire this guy. But if that was the case, why wouldn't he tell the waitstaff about it? He's been very open about the other goings-on at the restaurant. Or was it really that the only grounds for the booting were laziness and cheerfulness? And if our kitchenstaff had been American, would he have dared to fire someone on such hazy grounds?

The new dishwasher started today. We also had two other Spanish-speaking job seekers come in and ask about positions. (They communicated with the manager through the kitchenstaff's comparatively good command of rudimentary English.) It's an endless and cheap supply of labor. If one is too lazy (or too happy), just replace him. They're not Americans, after all.