She Can Still Point to the First Table
Some stories don’t need me to explain why they matter. They just need me to get out of the way.
On August 27, 2026, the Valencia County News-Bulletin in central New Mexico published a short profile of Rachel Getman, who has worked the dining room at Dion’s in Los Lunas since she answered a newspaper ad in 2003 (Moore, 2026).[1] The profile follows her through the ordinary verbs of the dining room: wiping, sweeping, corralling, hauling. By the paper’s account, she planned to retire this October.
Asked why she stayed, she gave an answer so plain it nearly slips past: “I just like working here” (Moore, 2026). The profile adds that she can still point to the first table she ever worked.
That table stays with me more than any milestone in the piece. Many careers leave their mark in a title or a framed certificate. Hers left it on a piece of restaurant furniture that has been wiped more times than anyone could count.
A Carpenter, a Church, and the Matter of Tables
In April 1942, with Britain deep in the war, the English writer Dorothy L. Sayers stood up in Eastbourne and said something her audience had not come to hear.[2] She was already known as a detective novelist and an unusually bold broadcaster of Christian ideas, and she spent that credibility on an unfashionable charge. The church, she argued, had lost its hold on reality by failing to respect the work people do on weekdays.
Her illustration was a carpenter. The church’s usual advice to such a man was to stay sober and come on Sundays, when the first demand of his faith ought to be that he build tables that are sound. No amount of piety, she added, makes up for work that is false to its own craft.
Her point was not simply that workers deserve respect. It was that work has standards of its own, and that devotion cannot excuse a failure to meet them (Sayers, 1942). Her closing sentence charged the church with seeing that “the worker serves the work,” a phrase that has outlived most of what surrounded it.
I can’t say whether Getman has read a word of Sayers, and nothing in the profile suggests she needs to. The crafts are not the same. One makes the table; the other makes it ready again, over and over, for the next guest. I suspect we praise the first kind of worker more readily than the second, though both are attending to a task whose value is easy to overlook when it is done well.
An earlier essay here followed Emily Roebling, whose labor waited a very long time to be named (The Telescope in Brooklyn Heights). Getman’s case runs on a shorter clock. Her profile appeared while she was still on the job, written by a young reporter in a statewide local-news fellowship program. That kind of notice, I would guess, is uncommon in her line of work.
What Work Is, What It Is Owed, What It Gives
Three passages sit near this profile. One speaks to what work is, one to what it is owed, and one to what it can end in. None was written about a restaurant, and the fit is partial.
And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.
Genesis 2:15 (KJV)[3]
The assignment comes before any curse, and it is already a job. The Hebrew verbs behind “dress” and “keep” can also be read as “serve” and “guard,” which makes Sayers’s insistence on serving the work less strange than it first sounds. That is a modest claim: work belongs to creation before it belongs to the market, so it cannot be called a punishment in itself. It does not follow that every job, or every working condition, is good.
At his day thou shalt give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it: for he is poor, and setteth his heart upon it.
Deuteronomy 24:15 (KJV)
This is labor law, not devotion. It treats a poor worker’s pay as something he has set his heart upon, and a delay in paying it as a wrong. Notice what the verse does not ask: whether the worker finds the job meaningful. The employer’s duty to pay does not depend on the worker turning labor into a story of fulfillment.
And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God.
Ecclesiastes 3:13 (KJV)
The Preacher spends chapters doubting that toil adds up to anything lasting, and still lands here. He does not promise that labor builds a monument. He allows that it can be enjoyed, and calls that a gift. That restraint matters here: it keeps joy from becoming a substitute for the wage Deuteronomy demands.
The profile says nothing about Getman’s beliefs, and I won’t supply any. These verses are my lens, not hers.
A reader need not take every hardship as a sentence handed down from heaven. What the text keeps insisting on is quieter: a society discloses the values it has settled on by whom it thanks, whom it pays on time, and whom it never notices at all.
What the Numbers Leave Out
Getman named reaching $18 an hour as her proudest milestone (Moore, 2026). For comparison, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put the national median hourly wage for dining room and cafeteria attendants, the federal category that covers bussers, at $15.71 in May 2024.[4] That is a national figure, and pay varies by region, so it marks a reference point, not a verdict. By that measure her $18 sits about $2.29 an hour above the median for the occupation, though the profile does not say what else her pay includes.
In January 2026, BLS found a median tenure of 2.2 years among workers in food preparation and serving occupations, against 4.1 years for all workers, and noted that workers in low-tenure industries tend to be younger.[5] Twenty-three years is more than ten times that occupational median, though no median can explain why one person stays.
Numbers like these usually produce one of two stories. In the first, loyalty is the whole moral, and a long tenure is admired the way we admire an old oak. In the second, the tenure is proof of a wage that should have climbed faster. Either can be told on a worker’s behalf without asking her, and each risks deciding from outside what her years were worth.
The profile records her naming her coworkers and her paycheck in the same breath as reasons for staying. That pairing is the pattern the three passages share.
Scripture refuses to split the dignity of work from the justice of its wage. Genesis gives the job its worth before any money changes hands. Deuteronomy insists the money arrive on time, and Ecclesiastes permits the worker to enjoy what the labor has bought.
The profile supplies its own evidence for that last part. Getman found her gratification in the people she served: her old elementary school principal, women with their grandchildren, cheerful regulars. She also remembered a booth left in a mess by children and said it pleased her to have cleaned it up.
Her retirement plans are built around a trip to the Transylvania Restaurant Bar in East Haven, Connecticut, which she has never visited and calls her favorite place anywhere, followed by Salem and Sleepy Hollow. She loves Halloween movies.
I find that plan quietly revealing: a retirement trip built around a place she has never visited. After twenty-three years of clearing tables for other people’s meals, she has picked a destination of her own, a restaurant bar where she will presumably, for once, be the one who sits down.
Enjoyment of one’s labor is not a bonus for those who earn the right title. It is what the Preacher called a gift, and in her case it points toward a trip to a bar she has only imagined.
Clean Until the Next Guests Arrive
A wiped table does not last. Within the hour someone sits down, and the work begins again. Ecclesiastes would recognize the feeling: a cycle of toil with nothing visibly accumulated. The profile suggests she did not experience it as futility, since the finished booth, by her own account, made her happy.
Yet hospitality is made of exactly this kind of task, undone by the very people it serves. Sayers’s carpenter leaves an object whose quality can be inspected. The dining-room worker leaves a condition that must be renewed: a table ready for the next guest. Both answer to the question Sayers cared about most, which is whether the work was done well.
In the previous installment, Adam Plummer’s lists crossed generations in other hands (The Diary That Changed Hands).
The newspaper says she can still point to the first table she worked. It is still there, a plain table, ready for whoever sits down next.
- Aubrie Moore, “Trusted Dion’s employee to retire after 23 years,” Valencia County News-Bulletin, August 27, 2026. ↩
- Dorothy L. Sayers, “Why Work?” (address delivered at Eastbourne, April 23, 1942; London: Methuen, 1942), reprinted in Letters to a Diminished Church (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004), 125–46. ↩
- Scripture quotations are from the King James Version (public domain). ↩
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2024, SOC 35-9011, as summarized at O*NET OnLine. ↩
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employee Tenure in 2026,” news release, September 24, 2026 (survey reference month: January 2026), Table 6. ↩
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