Another recent day at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) The (very fat) (bearded) (white) homeless man shows up again to use our patio furniture during the dinner shift, like two days after he first appeared.

"I don't like this," I say to my coworkers. "It's becoming a habit for him."

So, I step outside and am like, "Hello, Sir, can I help you?"

And, he looks up at me, and just this mean looks crosses his face and he snarls at me, "No."

So, I just let that wash over me, and I'm like, "These tables are for dine-in customers at our restaurant, if you need a place to rest, there's a public bench just around the corner," and as I say that, I point up to the main intersection that's like 3 storefronts up.

And, he doesn't say much, but as I go back inside, he gets up and goes to move along, heading off in that direction, as I can see through the front windows of the restaurant.

2)  My one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones doesn't show up for her dinner shift, since the owners are gone for a month on vacation in Thailand and although that day is usually her day off, she must not have looked at the schedule closely and seen the change that she was supposed to work that day instead of having it off like she usually does.

There's a fair amount of drama and texting, and as best as we can figure out, she was going to the movies that evening and she's probably in a local cineplex, and not only is she not looking at our messages, but she also probably won't look at them until the busy part of the evening is over, at which point it won't make sense for her to come in at all.

"But it's okay," my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker is like. "It's quiet, we can work without her."

And, I'm like, "Yeah, that's true," and then I add that I **love** this, since we can hold it over her head whenever we work with her from then on.

Later, too, I start creating all of these scenarios for why she might be gone, like, maybe she met her true love, and she's driving to Las Vegas right now to get married.

Like, maybe she was gardening this afternoon, and she raised her head, and across the street was this other guy gardening, and their eyes met, and he was so hot, so now she's going to Vegas.

Or, I said that I had seen posters around town for an all-female rockband -- I hadn't -- and I said that maybe she's at auditions.

Or, I said that we should count the sake bottles, because maybe she stole one and drank it this afternoon and passed out and didn't come to work.

Or, I said that maybe she went to the one local bakery that she likes, ate too much baked goods, passed out into a food coma, and they wouldn't notice her there and wake her up until they close the store at 6 o'clock. 

I also said that we could blackmail her, and tell her that she has to give us each fifty dollars so we won't tell the owners that she didn't come to work, or, alternately, if we had her punch-in code, we could have clocked her in and she could earn money for not being at work, which is a system that maybe we could do on slow days when the owners are in Thailand, where we arrange that one of us doesn't show up but we'd still clock them in, and then we'd all be paid for not working and they'd never find out.

Also also, I said that I finally figured out what her (Thai) name stands for, and I treated it like an acronym, and turned it into a short phrase about her not showing up at work. 

3) After work, my one (female) (Guatemalan) coworker tells me that she and her (American) fiance just found out that she's a month pregnant.

He has a six year-old boy and she has a ten year-old girl, and they are both surprised, but she kept saying in (Spanish) that this is a "blessing from God."