In the final pages of Dishwasher Pete Jordan finally decides to give up the whole dish gig and retires. He made it to dishing in a total of thirty three states, Gulf Shores, Alabama being his last. He is now a retired man. Three days later he’s already eighty miles away and back in school. One year later he and his girlfriend, Amy Joe, get married on a ferry boat crossing the San Francisco Bay. Pete and his wife move to Amsterdam were he is studying and decide they wanted to stay so Pete applies for a citizenship making Amsterdam their new home. But everything does not go as smoothly as planned; Pete cannot find work since he is American and fears he and his wife will be forced to move back to the states. You see that Pete finally reaches a point where he is tired of coming home with the same new of his bad luck forcing him to make a serious choice. He decides he will dish again. Pete prints up flyers and goes to restaurant after restaurant looking for a job but he is turned down time after time. He is confused, he has more than enough qualifications to work at any of the restaurants, it even says so on his flyer but yet no one will hire him. Finally he meets a kitchen manager at an Australian themed restaurant who sets him strait, he tells Pete if he’s older than twenty-three “I’d have to pay you the full minimum wage. But if I hire a sixteen-year-old to wash the dishes, I pay him a minimum wage that’s half yours” (358). Pete takes this in and thinks “So it’d come to this. Not only was I not qualified to do anything else, but the one thing I could do, I was now overqualified for. In the city where many Americans go to indulge in their vices like pot-smoking and legalized prostitution, I found myself cut off from my own vice, cold turkey (353). This is an ironic ending; in the beginning of this book dishwashing was made out to be an easy low skill job that anyone could do. Pete takes his dishing jobs for granted, they come and go without a second thought but now when he’s actually in serious need of a dish job he is no longer “qualified” to get the job that was once second nature to him.

Jordan, Pete. Dishwasher : One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States. New York: HarperPerennial, 2007.