Workplace drama.

So, a few months ago on like a Friday night, this (skinny) (mid-20s) (mustachioed) (light-skinned hispanic) guy with vaguely (hipster) clothing comes in through the front door and tells me quite normally that he's picking up, so of course I send him to the back counter, and after he leaves, it turns out that he was all weird and just super super quiet when he went back to the back counter, like he was practically whispering the woman’s name that he was picking up the order for, to the point where my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker had to ask him to repeat the name like two to three times, before they could finally hear what it was and give him the right order.

And, after he leaves, our one (younger) (taller) (skinny) (Latino-American) coworker comes over, and it turns out that the order was for his (cool) ex-girlfriend.

“I wonder if that’s her new boyfriend,” he was like, groaning.

So, we go and take the receipt and plug it into the system, and it kicks up her name and some guy’s name, and as he starts googling the guy to see who he is, we open up the order history for his (cool) ex-girlfriend and we can see that they’ve ordered together like three times, where she always eats the stir fry that she ate when she was with him, while the new guy was trying around a few  different dishes before finally arriving at eating the same thing as her.

And, I start making jokes like he should have left a note in the bag for her, and at first I say that he should be like, “I didn’t spit in the food,” but then I say that he should have bought a mango sticky rice and tucked it in there for them with a note to his ex being all like, “Enjoy this dessert, I thought you needed something sweet,” at my saying which our one (chubby) (Thai) coworker broke out in a smile and was like, “Yes, yes, that’s the one, you should write that.”

Our one (younger) (taller) (skinny) (Latino-American) coworker then had to go out on a delivery run, and then when he came back I told him that he had left one investigative thread undone – “I’m telling you this, to help you as a journalist,” I was like, since he has a history of working on student newspapers -- and when he wasn’t sure what that investigative thread was, I pointed out that they had both their names under her phone number, and so I pull up the order history under the guy’s name, which he hadn’t looked at since we had only pulled up hers, earlier, and it turns out that they had ordered together under his name like 3 times starting like 6-7 weeks after the break-up, before she shifted the ordering back to her name for the like 3 times extending through the order on that very night.

“September?!”, he was like, “September?!”.

And, he then stated his disbelief that she had started dating the guy so soon after their break-up.

“But when did you start dating that girl you’re seeing now?”, I was like, and he did some counting in his head, and he was like, “Yeah, I guess it was around then, too,” but then his mind turned back to the situation at hand and he still couldn’t believe it, and he was like, “September?!”.

I then suggested that he send our one (chubby) (Thai) coworker to go do pick-up in his name at the bar/restaurant where his (cool) ex-girlfriend works, and he liked the idea, but he said that he would send his current girlfriend instead.

“But what if they fight?”, I was like. “Who would win in a fight?”.

And, he said that his (cool) ex-girlfriend would win the war of words, but his current girlfriend is a boxer and she’d win any physical fight.

“Then she would win,” I was like. “In a situation like that, words ain’t shit.”

. . .

(Oddly, after this he let us in on a coworker backstory, too, that the one [white] [female] [townie] delivery driver was in the same boxing club that his current girlfriend is in, and she was even a national amateur champion or something.)

A New Year’s greeting exchange.

I texted the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) who I know and his one (nerdy) (worked-out) (Brazilian) colleague a New Year’s greeting, in the one obscure language that they both know that I have been studying for potential dual citizenship purposes -

[“Happy New Year!” in that language]

and then I texted –

(That’s “Happy New Year1” in [name of the obscure language].)

- to which the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) replied back –

Vai dar teu cu

And –

That’s HNY in guarani

- to the great amusement of his colleague on the conversation.

. . .

(I think that means “You’re going to give up your ass” in Portuguese.)

The jigsaw puzzle preference of a (well-dressed) (local) (older) (white) woman…

…who I meet at the “take one, leave one” jigsaw puzzle exchange table at the local public library, as we both look through what puzzles are set out there:

Her favorite ones are the ones with gridded squares like rows and rows of movie posters, she says.

. . .

(. . .) 

Addendum.

Like the next time I wear the reindeer hat to work, a(n older) (thin) (spectacle-wearing) lady who seems like a(n educated) (liberal) and who is in there with a man who appears to be her (husband) and whose face I vaguely recognize compliments me on it, and when I tell her that I made it myself, she says that I should do the same thing for other holidays, like one for Valentine’s Day and then one for Saint Patrick’s Day, etc.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking!”, I was like.

Build-up to Christmas this year…

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

1) The (Thai) (wife) restaurant owner with the tired face buys hunter green paper napkin rings to mix in with our typical maroon paper napkin rings, so that together they’re red and green and look like Christmas.

2) I debut my homemade Christmas hat, which is the same one that I put horns on for Halloween, only now I put on big brown construction paper antlers like a reindeer, since my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones said during Halloween that I should do that for Christmas.

Only, she seems super apathetic about my hat, which I remark on to a number of people, since she was the person who had encouraged me to do that, and then she goes and bes apathetic

“That’s because she’s jealous,” says the one (Thai) (wife) restaurant owner with the tired face.

3) A big table of like 6-7 people including a high chair come in, including this (older) (scrawny) (bearded) (white) man who seems both intense and vaguely out of it, like he waves for us and says that they’re ready to order, and he like takes offense when he orders a vegetarian dish and I ask if fish and oyster sauce is okay in that dish.

“It’s under vegetarian,” he’s like, confrontationally.

“Different people have different definitions and preferences and we try to respect them all, that’s why we ask” I was like.

“So is there any sauce at all?”, too, a (younger) (white) woman at the table asks, when she orders a similar vegetarian dish but wants it without fish and oyster sauce.

(The answer is yes, because we substitute for those if they’re in there… Somehow, we’ve never fielded that interpretation of the option before, though! So malleable is language.)

Later, too, when the kid in the highchair drops some food, the old guy looks at him all exasperated and is like, “Why did you do that?!”, which makes me wonder if he has some sort of early-stage dementia, since all of his behavior is so inappropriately calibrated to all of the audiences I’ve seen him interacting with, although the woman who might be his daughter seems odd, too, so who knows, it might just be a weird family.

4) At one point this (plump) (grad student-age) (darker-skinned) (South Asian) woman with big fluffed-out hair sits at a small table at the back, and I ask her to move to the waiting area at the side since it’s getting busy and tables are filling up and we might need that table for dine-in customers soon, and she seems confused but moves, and then later I see her sitting at another nearby small table with a menu and dine-in stuff set around her, which makes me realize that she must have slipped in without being seated and assumed that people sat themselves, and then eventually we must have realized what was going on and some of my coworkers must have brought things to her.

(She leaves a normal 15-18% tip on her meal.)

5) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker says that she’s tired from working so many days in a row, and I point to my antler hat and act like I’m a reindeer and am like, “You’re tired?! I had to drag around Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus all day in their sled, and they were heavy!”

A cold snap (2 of 2): Another day.

1) When I walk into work, it’s a new month and I have to get my new timecard ready, and when I go to put it in the timecard rack right there by the ice machine, there is my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker’s new timecard, and by the part where you fill in the month, she wrote -- -- -- “last month Dec.”

2) My one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones said it was just a slow-to-normal lunch shift that past Sunday, but so many people wanted hot water with their meals instead of normal water that we actually ran out of clean mugs that we could give them (we have like 18-20 or so).

A cold snap (1 of 2): One day.

1) I wake up early and shovel before going in to work a double shift, and by the time that I come back around to my cottage from the front of the house, there’s a thin layer of snow already back where I had begun.

2) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker calls in over the phone to order a duck soup and have it out and hot waiting for her so she can eat it before her shift starts, and I don’t recognize her voice over the phone, at first.

3) During my hourlong break, I want to go somewhere and get a hot coffee but it’s so cold, and so my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker who just got on shift says she’ll make me some good coffee with her various coffee contraptions that she’s brought into work, and so I just sit at a table at the side of the restaurant during my break and drink the coffee that she made me, without going outside at all.

4) The (new) (stoic-faced) (female) (Guatemalan) kitchen worker is coming back from the restroom and she pauses to look at these wrapped presents that we have up as like holiday decorations, and she pretends to take one for herself and walk away with it.

And, it’s the biggest one, so I remark on that in (Spanish), and she just smiles and is like, “Si” (“Yes”).

5) A very jovial (early 40s) (bearded) (South Asian) customer who’s visiting from out-of-town and eating out with his friend wants raw ginger with his tea, and so I say that we can do that for him but we request that he only put the ginger in his mug and not in the thermos, and I remind him of that again when I bring out the raw ginger, and he pretends to be confused and puts on a straight face and is like, “What, I need to put the ginger in the thermos?”, just to mess with me.

6) The one (smiley-faced) (Guatemalan) kitchen worker comes up to me and wants to know how you translate the phrase “Which one?” into (Spanish), and what it means.

7) By the end of shift, I’ve been at the restaurant all day, and I’d only been outside once, to take out the trash to the back alley dumpster as part of our end-of-shift duties.

8) At night in my cottage after I turn my lights off, I hear a loud crack from my nearby window like something could have snapped or possibly someone walked up outside and did something, and I leap up out of bed and go check that the front door is locked at 1:30am, including the outer screen door with its loose latch, and then I stay up a bit and look out through various windows and screens far away from the noise but from where I can obliquely see towards there, to make sure that everything is okay and that it’s not what I fear that it is.