A recent period at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, this past summer:

1) We're working on a very hard word puzzle for days and it's down to 4 words, and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones looks at it but says she can't help because she's not a native speaker of (English), but I gradually pick off 3 of the last 4 words, and the last one we know is a word at last 9 letters long that has three Cs in it somewhere and that means "culinary mixture," and after like 20 minutes when it's towards the very end of the shift out of nowhere she's like, "Concoction," and that was it.

So, I started calling her "my hero," and I even stopped by the local resale shop that has tons of offbeat goods for arts and crafts and bought an old huge track medal for a quarter, and I pasted yellow paper on each side, with one side saying "[HER FIRST NAME] IS #1", and the other side saying "CON - COC - TION."

2) When it comes time to order dessert, this (late 60s) (stringy-looking) (white) woman who's there as half of 1 of the 2 couples who are out eating together is interested in sharing mango sticky rice, but not when I go back into the kitchen and ask for her and she finds out that the key ingredient of the coconut sauce contains trace amounts of gluten and it can't be effectively remade or substituted.

And, that was after she had ordered and eaten a whole thing of fried rice that has gluten in the soy sauce, without even checking into gluten-free anything beforehand.

(Gluten-free people are freaky and erratic, since it's a pseudoscientific fringe diet and it's not like any of them actually have celiac disease or anything like that, too. And most of them look as unhealthy as f*ck, like those poor starved children whose hippie parents only feed them whole grains and herbal supplements and stunt their growth and make them look wan, to the point where a poor little 6 year-old looks like a 4 year-old and whatnot.)

3) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker tells me about how she took the one (older) (Thai-Chinese) cook to the train station, since he quit the restaurant and was going to work somewhere else in the nearby region, though he didn't say where.

And, she didn't ask about anything with his reasons or where he was going, so as to not know or involve herself any more than she had to.

(I've heard that [Thai] culture is conflict-averse like that.)

She's also worried know that the restaurant won't be the same, since he was the one who really knew how to do weird substitutions that tasted good when people wanted to omit major ingredients from dishes.

"So I know what we do," I was like, "We go around to Thai restaurants and ask for pad see you without oyster sauce, and when we find one that tastes good, we'll know that he's there, and that's how we find him again."