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My first job in Dublin, was at the Italian restaurant Ciao Bella Roma.
They hired me as a pizza-baker-in-training. I was put in front of the oven with S_, a randy Italian fellow about 45 years old.
"I've been doing this for 20 years," he once told me. It struck me as a bit sad, here outside of the traditional Italian setting. But this feeling, I admit — the feeling that his point of pride was a bit sad — came well after S_ had determined that I was unable to bake pizza.
I admit, also, that he was good. He could handle a lump of dough and work it rounded across the stone edge of the table and produce a lovely perfect evenly-rounded-and-sized pizza base.
But he told me I couldn't bake pizza. I'd made good pizzas years before, New-York style (in Oregon,) using a wooden rolling-pin to shape the base. In that case, I'd worked with an excellent chef who had insisted that I could do the work.
My skill didn't translate in the manly traditional world of the old-world Ciao Bella.
They relegated me to the basement, and the prep-work. Still, it wasn't a bad job. The work was neither arduous nor highly-stressful, and once settled in I discovered those of my co-workers whom I could appreciate. (My favorite was the ancient fellow whose name I cannot remember and who did not speak English. We liked each other, and laughed along with each other — not speaking five words of each other's language.)
I left Ciao Bella after a month or so, but only because I thought that I'd found a better job, working as a baker at much better pay. That other job turned out to be worse — starting with a misunderstanding about the wage-packet there, and concluding with a relegation to night-time hours (worse than any basement) based upon the [egad!] French head-baker's opinion that I do not know how to bake bread.
Worse, the manager of the bakery had hired me and then had told me we'd have to wait until their head baker returned from vacation (holiday) before I could begin.
I had no work. The rent, of course, was due . I asked the boss at Ciao Bella if he would re-hire me. He would not.