
Writer's note: This immersion piece does not aim to point fingers at anyone but just honestly transcribes my experience as a student worker at The Ohio State University. I worked at Juice 2 from Oct. 5, 2018, to April 30, 2019.
I put on my black uniform T-shirt and clip my name tag on my right chest. I put my jacket on and check that I have my BuckID in my left pocket.
It takes me 10 minutes to walk past Ohio Stadium, the lot slowly emptying its cars and the orange setting sunset reflected in the windows of the buildings. I casually pull open the glass doors like the place is my second home and a swipe of my student ID card lets me pass through the gates.
I turn right and clock in on the wall device —a black box with a screen attached to the wall. “Card swipe-in accepted Tristan RELET-WERKMEISTER,” reads the screen.
While I’m removing my jacket and sweatshirt and putting my hat on, I hear the beeps of the printers printing orders, the clatter of ice cubes and frozen fruits being blended and the water spraying on the dishes in the back. I wash my hands.
I’m ready to start my 76th shift as an employee of Juice 2, a smoothie bar inside the RPAC, the largest gym at Ohio State.
And yes, it is as glamorous as it sounds.
In September 2018, after an unsuccessful month of job and internship hunting, I applied to dining services. After a five-minute, three-question interview, I was hired —the newest student assistant at Juice 2, working 12 hours a week at $9 an hour.
I knew it wouldn’t be my dream job. It turned out that it wasn’t a bad job, either.
I started Oct. 5 at 3 p.m. A manager showed me where and how to clock in, gave me a purple T-shirt —think Barney, not eggplant— and a black hat.
We were called a smoothie bar, but Juice 2 also sold Acai bowls (a sort of ice cream bowl with fruit toppings), coffee drinks and grab’n go items. Turns out the T-shirt color reflects experience, so I asked a girl with a black shirt —clearly more experienced than me at the time— how I could help. She showed me a laminated sheet of paper with recipes for all the smoothies.
After an order was printed, she told me to wet the ticket, stick it to the blender, then pointed to the recipe sheet and walked me through the smoothie-making process.
Order one: Peanut Butter Banana. The sheet read: “7oz - Soy Milk, 1 Level 4 oz. Ladle - Ice, 2 Level Tan Scoops - Bananas, 1 Level Blue Scoop - Peanut Butter.”

I opened the fridge and grabbed a box of soy milk and poured in enough to drown the blade at the bottom. Then I went to the counter —slaloming through coworkers— opened the ice cube container and grabbed a ladle full of ice. I filled the blender with the remaining ingredients: supplements, frozen fruits and peanut butter.
Then I grabbed a lid and pressed 1 (for one smoothie). Eighteen seconds later, I poured the smoothie into the cup and served it. As the customer came to pick up the order, I said, “Have a nice day,” then washed the blender and the lid, ready to do it again.
The whole process took me five minutes. Not bad. Or so I thought.
Employees are actually supposed to complete smoothie orders in about two minutes. And Juice 2’s 65 employees complete up to 1,400 orders a day, up to 150 an hour.
During that first shift, I only made smoothies, but after a week I asked to be taught how to make bowls. Coffees came the week after.
I also learned the rules.
For example, phones are forbidden during shifts. Workers also face “corrective action points for infractions:
- Not showing up to a shift is four points.
- Calling off a shift at least two hours in advance is two points.
- Cancelling less than two hours before a shift is like not showing up.
- Being late is one point.
- During finals week and designated weekends, infraction points are doubled.
Six or more points, and employees are terminated. I wasn’t too concerned —until fall break.
I had to call off and received two “corrective action points” for it.
Gulp.
A month after being hired, I learned from a manager that I actually needed to complete an official training. Wasn’t I supposed to be trained before starting to work? Or at least earlier?
The training was composed of multiple interactive videos and slides on various topics: how to use a knife (but nothing is cut with a knife at Juice 2, unless the strawberry cutter is broken); how to cook food (but nothing is cooked at Juice 2); how to take card payments (but the vast majority of customers order themselves on a kiosk or a mobile app).
The only part of the training that I found useful was about allergies and cross-contamination: make sure orders for allergic customers are done by managers, when and how often to change gloves, how to sanitize.

It also would have been useful to learn what to do in the event of a mice infestation.
By the end of fall semester, a customer took a Snapchat video of a mouse under the grab’n go cooler of Juice 2. My manager tried to look underneath it, and I helped him push the refrigerators and look in the back with my phone’s flashlight.
We didn’t find it at that time, but another employee told me she found one behind the fruit freezer in the front about a month later.
On Dec. 31, I was stocking up the island of the RPAC's restaurant, Courtside, with straws, salt, pepper and napkins; and a customer seated at a table behind leaned toward me and waved:
“Hey! I don’t know if I should tell you, but I’m pretty sure I saw a mouse under this.”
“Thanks for telling me!” I said, trying to stay calm. I opened all the doors of the island to find where the mouse was. I didn’t see it, and to be honest, I wasn’t looking very hard.
I went to the dining services management office and knocked. A manager slightly opened the door:
“Hey Tristan, what’s up?”
“A customer just told me he saw a mouse under the island in front of courtside, what should I do?”
“Oh, OK.”
He shut the door.
One night, after having swept the floors, my manager asked me to take out the broom and brush and store them in the trash room.
“Why can’t I just leave them here?” I asked.
“Mouses use them to climb up here,” he replied, pointing at the employee cup holder in the back on Juice 2, where mouse feces were often found.
On Feb. 1, I worked a closing shift starting at 8 p.m. I went to the sink to wash my hands and get started, turning on the hot water first. What should have been clear liquid was instead poured forth like watery coffee.
Looking closely revealed floating pieces of, well, something.
Other employees told me it had been like that for the past two hours.
That meant customers had been served brown water. The blenders, bells, spoons and tools were cleaned in brown water. Employees washed their hands in brown water.

Iced drinks, which are usually filled with tap water, this time used brown water.
“Wait, we’re still open?” I asked, turning to my manager.
“Yea,” he replied, while slightly shrugging his shoulders.
He said he notified full-time management about the issue and he told them we should close just out of precaution, but they declined.
“Don’t drink the water,” he told employees and instead offered bottled water.
And as I made coffee and ice drinks that evening, I used bottled water, even though my manager didn’t tell me to. I simply couldn’t hand someone a cup and say “Have a nice evening” while I wasn’t even sure that what I gave them was safe to drink.
However, because unsold food that will expire the next day is considered unsafe to eat, dining services’ policy is to dump it.

We usually have a few bagels to share among ourselves, but on March 25, 25 sandwiches and 13 bagels had to be thrown away. The next day? 33 sandwiches and nine bagels. It appeared we had so much food because stock was ordered in regular quantities for the previous week.
But the previous week was spring break. And during that week, even our regular customers probably didn’t come.
The more often I worked, the more I got to know our “regulars.” A man in his 70s as tall as the grab’n go refrigerator asking for a large cup of hot water every day around 9 p.m., blonde identical twin men rewarding themselves with a smoothie after their workout, and a guy about 6 feet 4 inches and 25 years old, wearing sleeveless T-shirts, ordering peanut butter banana smoothies with chocolate sauce on top, not blended with it.

A few times, I explained to elder people how to use the kiosks, and in most cases they gave up and asked me to take their order through the traditional register.
“You look like a Greek,” a customer once told me, while I was making an Acai bowl.
“I’m French,” I replied, smiling.
“Oh no you’re not, you look like a Greek,” he said very seriously.
We also get customers who make us smile, ask us how we’re doing, and we share our anecdotes among coworkers.
“If you could just put a little more extra peanut butter in that it would be phenomenal, if not that’s fine,” read a special request at the bottom of an order my manager was making. “Thank you wonderful person, hope closing is fast for you.”
We’re usually six employees to work each closing shift. On Jan. 11, we welcomed a new employee, a female freshman.
“I can show her how to make bowls,” I told my manager.
During her first shift, I showed her almost everything we make at Juice 2 and she didn’t seem overwhelmed. She kept smiling even though I talked to her for half an hour about employee meal policies, work-appropriate clothing, smoothie-making, bowl-making, etc.
“If you have any question at any point or if there’s something you don’t understand, please ask me,” I repeated like a broken record.
Seeing her make her first bowl made me remember mine, three months ago. Her moves were quite hesitant, slow, and she made eye contact with me several times to be sure she was doing it right.
Less than a month after, after having cleaned a few blenders in the back, I came to the front and saw her handling five bowl orders by herself. I didn’t think about it at that time, but when I walked back home, I felt a sense of accomplishment: I had taught someone how to do something, and she became great at it.
On April 6, just like on any other shift with off-peak times, we talked a lot about our job, complained about classes (apparently my manager’s business class had tough exams). We also made fun of my half-British-half-French accent —yes, I’ll keep saying ‘woter’ instead of ‘wader.’
A full-time manager came to Juice 2 and asked me to come to the office to complete an online training. I finished the bowls I was making, went to the office and logged into BuckeyeLearn. I clicked on “Launch” to start the training “Payment Card Industry 2019.” While I was reading the slides on the screen, the full-time manager asked me a few questions for an internal survey:
“What positive factor contributed to your dining experience?” he asked.
“Coworkers relations,” I replied straight away.
“And what negative factor contributed to your dining experience?” he continued.
“Stock management … I mean food waste,” I replied after a few seconds of reflection.
“When are you graduating?”
“Oh, I’m an exchange student so I’ll just leave in three weeks.”
While he was about to type something in an Excel spreadsheet, he looked up his computer screen.
“Never to return,” he said, while clicking in a cell next to my name.
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