Monday, January 15, 2024

Puzzle drama (3 of 3): Aftermath.

A few days after that puzzle magazine crackdown, I come onto shift at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, and it’s slow, and my one (older) (Thai) coworker is doing some kind of mild squat-like exercises behind the counter.

“See,” I’m like, “No puzzles, so now we do aerobics.”

And, she didn’t exactly laugh, but she didn’t exactly disagree.

Otherwise, the shift was uneventful. It was Hanukkah, and a local townsperson had come in at 8am to use the deep fryer for latkes, and it was also mid-academic year graduation so we had a few large parties in (“Who’s the graduate, what’s the program?”, I said as I always do in such cases, in this instance to this one large [South Asian] family, and it was a young [plumpish] man with a bachelor’s in computer science, and when they said they were eating family-style, I told the [similar-looking] [plumpish] mother that he could write a program to figure out the optimal distribution of plates and bowls, to her general delight).

My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker observed to me that day, as well, that the reason I like doing research on the one ancient language that I’ve been researching intensively the past few years, is because it’s like a puzzle – and I said that she was right, and that she’s the second person to have observed it to me!

. . .

(Years ago my one assisted living client with [disabilities] had also said the same thing to me, that it scratched the same part of my brain and my personality as my doing crosswords and stuff like that, and I had never noticed that before, but I had to agree, automatically, since she was right. How observant, both of them.)

No comments: