What if there was a better way to talk to all your friends than through a thousand different messaging apps on a thousand different platforms?

What if you could just find the show you wanted without browsing through infinite tiles in a hundred different streaming apps?

What if you could have all of your stuff everywhere without dealing with some crummy user interface on some unknowable file sharing platform?

This month on the Vergecast we're looking into connectivity. How we talk to each other, how we talk to our stuff, how we find things online.

All this month, on the Vergecast, available wherever you get podcasts.

I'm Maureen Near. I'm 33 and currently reside in Chicago, Illinois.

I started cooking while I was in college, getting my interior design degree.

It was always an interest of mine growing up, but like I started actually cooking in restaurants and was like, Oh, I'm into this.

Maureen was a chef in Chicago, and she liked her work, but it came with a lot of downsides.

All the things you hear about working in a kitchen are true. Long hours, she pay, lots of stress, lots of chaos, lots of Bernie, Cutty, you know.

When the pandemic hit, she decided it was time for a change.

I was like, I don't want to be in the service industry. I already know how customers act. It's only going to get worse.

Maureen is one of hundreds of thousands of service workers across the US that didn't return to the industry when the country started opening back up.

And I was able to take the time to apply to seven million jobs and finally get one.

Restaurants, hotels and other hospitality businesses are trying to address the labor shortage by raising wages, but still many workers aren't coming back.

Oh, yeah. We've had people, a lot of people leave the industry over the last 18, 20 months.

Detailer is the president of Unite here, a union that represents workers in hotel and food service jobs.

So it sounds like hospitality workers were already pretty burnt out by the time the pandemic hit.

How did the last two years make things worse in the hospitality industry?

Well, in most part, those workers were abandoned by the companies who said that they were wonderful.

The pandemic hit a lot of shutdown. Workers were discarded like an old pair of shoes.

Those that were still working off and were overworked underpaid.

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