Guatemalans (2 of 2): Ergonomic reflections.

For one thing at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now, there's a very short shelf with just two levels that sits on the tile kitchen floor in the hallway going back into the kitchen, and that's where we bus all of our dishes and glasses; with it, there's like the actual two shelves for the tubs for the dishes, and then on top of the whole unit, that's where we place the racks for the glasses.

And, I've seen one of the dish guys have to bend over and pick up the heavy dish tubs from the bottom shelf, and I worried about his back.

For another thing at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now, there's been a couple more recent hires in the kitchen, including this one (slightly older) (very very short) (clean-shaven) (Guatemalan) with a small pot belly.

And, I've seen him lean in to get the heavy dish tubs from the bottom shelf, but since he's so low to the ground, it seemed more ergonomic and so I didn't worry about his back as much.

For a second it made me think that that's like a side bonus to hiring (Guatemalans), less workplace injuries that way.

Guatemalans (1 of 2): Backstory.

At the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I was talking a very little bit with my one (Guatemalan) coworker the other day, the (younger) one who is very short and who knows a (Chilean) in the area from ESL classes.

He was saying he was tired, and I asked him how much he was working a week, and he said sixty hours.

"Too much," he was like.

"Do you have family here?", I was like.

"My brother," he was like, and then I asked him if they sent money home to the family, and he said that yes, they did.

(His brother works at the restaurant, too.)

One other day I was making a joke with him about beer or something, and he said he didn't drink, and then I asked him if he was Christian, and he was, and he wanted to say something but didn't know the word, so I was like, "Pentecostal?", and he was like, "Yes," and then he told me about a Vida Apostolica church that he goes to out on the edge of town, and I had to look it up on a map since I didn't know where it was.

Youth malaise.

Two of the college students from the front house were set to graduate from college this past semester but didn't, I found out when I bumped into one of them outside the other week (he had run home on break from his managerial job at the local Target to smoke up, and was leaning against his car parked out in front on the street, as rolls of marijuana scent just came off of him).

He also said his roommate was thinking of transferring to the local community college to complete a few classes there.

"We should really finish up but we're not," he was like.

"It's not like there's anything necessarily glorious waiting for you on the other side," I was like, and he seemed to agree, saying that the only real reason he has to finish up is so that both of his elderly grandmothers can see him graduate from college.

And these are STEM MAJORS at a nationally-recognized flagship state school.

What a huge f*cking youth malaise there is, nowadays.

One of my new coworkers at the (Thai) restaurant is a cool disaffected (Chinese-American) guy who is pretty nice, who said he was a physics major at that school but had to take time off because of how the pandemic messed with him, and now he's just taking classes at the local community college.

He also said he tries not to listen to the news, since it's bad for his mental health.

"Like Trump's taxes," he was like, "I just don't listen."

Credit card companies...

...take off 10% per order, the bosses said, and that's why we have our tipped wages deducted accordingly when they're processed through credit cards.

That seems a bit high to me, but the overall logic is legal, per what I've read on Google.

That said, even if the percentage is lower and they adjusted that up to 10%, I still get a free meal every shift and so that more than makes up for any difference there.

Addendum: The big printer, and automated phone confirmations.

Also, since the big printer can print out 2 or 3 pages when only 1 is needed, the one (Thai) manager who's a whiz at phone orders sometimes takes ten or fifteen minutes and separates out the sheets that are largely unused, draws a pen line through them so you know that side isn't applicable any more, and feeds them into the printer to reuse the paper.

 (We have a special pile next to the big printers, where we stack the largely unused sheets and save them for her.)

Overall I approve of this, but sometimes the new order is printed over some printing on a barely used page and it's hard to read, so you have to stop and look real carefully at it, or you have to go to the app's associated tablet or smartphone and pull up the email that you got for that order and look for all of the details there, so you can enter that order through the restaurant's standard ordering system and make the order active.

Also also, one or two of the apps also sends you an automated phone call where you have to punch in a confirmation number from the printout, though I also think you can preempt that by going online through the corresponding order email and do something there.

A reflection on delivery apps.

From the restaurant side of things, they're all really jacked.

At the (Thai) restaurant, we have like 6 of them set up on all of these different tablets and smartphones arrayed around the one cash register, and they all do things differently...

Some send a printout to the associated big-page printer that can print out 2 or even 3 pages at a time even though only 1 is really needed, and some don't, and so you only have the standard order receipt for those other orders.

Two of them send orders that you also have to type in through the standard restaurant order system.

Like two or three of them make you hit some confirm button.

One or two of them sometimes have individual items priced wrong, so you have to adjust individual item prices up a dollar or two sometimes for some individual items.

Others of them have it clearly marked if people want plastic utensils, so with like two or three of them you have to know which default to no utensils, and with another two or three of them you have to know which default to your putting utensils in.

Also, for some of them, they assign drivers, but for others they can assign drivers but they can also make the restaurant deliver, so you have to have a different in-house procedure for both of those situations.

It also can be a whole thing if someone puts in an order earlier with a delay, since somehow (I'm not sure how) it can get mixed up and sent to the kitchen early, though it seems that the bosses are somehow monitoring things for mistakes since like maybe once a shift they run out to stop the kitchen from making something on one of those orders.

On top of all that, only two are maybe used regularly, so it's hard to remember how the other ones operate.

Tips for takeout can be shit, too... It's a lot of work to figure all of this stuff out, and since as waitstaff we also do hosting and coordinate takeout orders, a lot of times you're doing all of this and you get zero tip on top of it, though I'm not complaining overall since I think on average I tend to make about $17 an hour there, which isn't too bad at all, especially for someplace where you get a free basic meal per shift and it's a short walk from your house.

Confounding factor.

The other week at the one (Thai) restaurant where I now work, one of the tablets for the many many delivery apps that we have started sending off some notification signal, and since it's one that we rarely use, I made sure to ask the one owner about it, not the husband, who wasn't around, but rather the wife with the tired face.

When I did that, she was like, "I showed you last week," and I was like, "There's so many that I forget." I also said that I hadn't seen an order on that app for at least a month before that, and although she was nice about it and said that there's a lot, she also was a little bit pushy and insistent and was like, "I want you to remember this time."

It was totally like an expectation of automatic rote memorization from an instructor figure, like my one (Thai) (newlywed) ex-coworker would do every so often, in addition to the crabby and grouchy stuff that she did on top of it.

No wonder I had a hard time picking up on that part of her personality...  What was her, and what was Thai?