More work...

...at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, where I work now:

1) They're going to toss the turkey chili, and so I put some in a tin to take home and the rest I put in my ceramic tea-mug, to sip and eat all the rest of the night as I work.

2) When we load up a catering order for the football team, we're stacking the boxes in big black plastic garbage bags for transport, but some slide around and so my one (balded) (bearding) (pun-loving) coworker goes to reposition them and he asks me to stop everything and hold them here and spread, which phrasing I immediately call his attention to.

"Nice," he's like.

3) My one (young) (bearded) (vaguely Jewish) (local) coworker needed a haircut and his hair was getting curly, and my one (affable) coworker who was in the (military) also needed a haircut and hadn't shaved in a while, so I pointed out to them that they were increasingly looking like each other and then for most of the rest of that shift I began calling them by each other's names, like I was confusing them, even though there's obvious differences between them like with their heights.

"And maybe I should start rocking some glasses," my one (young) (bearded) (vaguely Jewish) (local) coworker was like, meaning that he'd need glasses in order to truly start looking more like our other coworker.

4) The (redheaded) (big personality) owner has some finger injury and her hands get wet during the height of the dinner rush, so she stops everything to re-wrap them, only to realize that she'd taped two of her fingers together.

"Look what I did," she says, shaking her head and showing everyone.

And, she leaves them like that, since she doesn't have time to re-do the wrapping properly around just the one finger, there's so many other demands on her time right then.

(Some nights she sleeps in the office, by the way, I've found out.)

5) For some reason the trash by dish that we scrape food into has over it that heavily magnetized metal top that grabs silverware and bottles caps that you're throwing out, and I'm over by there cleaning a metal tray and it actually grabs the end of it out of my hand and pulls it down onto it, the magnet is so strong.

And, my one (affable) coworker who was in the (military) was standing there and saw that, so I'm like, "Wow, that thing is almost as attractive as I am."

"But more metal," he's like, immediately.

6) This big table of mostly (old) (white) people is there and from the behavior of one lady who seems "particular" I can tell that they're going to be a problem, like we keep checking on them and they're never ready, and then when we're in the middle of things for other tables they call out loudly to us to get our attention to go do things for them, and they say that they're ready to order like they've been ignored and waiting for ever, even though we had been regularly checking on them and they didn't seem in any sort of hurry at all.

And, "WAITER," they all call out to me in unison when I'm ten feet away during dessert order time, and that p*sses me off, and so I say that we had checked on dessert earlier and they were not ready, and that I saw my coworker assisting them and they weren't sure on the order and she had brought out a piece of cake to help them decide, and that was the status of their table as of five minutes ago to my knowledge so had they placed a dessert order or could I help them with something else, and they then tried to place an order for a dessert that we were out of and I had informed them already that we were out of, about which I was then like, "Okay, when we talked about dessert earlier I had said that that was out, our available desserts are..." and I listed them out again, and I used my eldercare voice where you use short declarative sentences after summarizing past interactions and the current state of affairs.

"And is dessert free for the birthday boy?", the one "particular" lady whines out in her slow creaky voice, after they finally place their dessert order.

"I'm very sorry, ma'am," I was like, "But we do not offer that at this restaurant." 

7) A table of a(n old white) guy in a collared shirt and a father-and-daughter (Amish) pair come in, and it comes out that he knows them from church and that he wanted to take them to the restaurant because he was involved years ago with saving the historic building that the restaurant is now in, and he wanted to show them what it had become.

"I always thought this was a nice space and we needed to save it for something," he was like. 

Furthermore, it turns out that he has a connection to a country where my paternal family came from, and visits through some church agency resulted in not only lifelong connections there, but also his owning a hotel in one city.

"So do I get a discount if I show up and say that I know you?", I was like, pokinga a little fun at him.

"Why yes, if you let me know ahead of time," he was like, quite-matter-of-factly, stating that it was called "Friends of Wilmer" and when you checked in all you had to do was say that you were "Friends of Wilmer" for a 10% discount.

At the end of their meal, too, I showed them around, and when I gestured to the big skylights at the center of the main room, the (Amish) father took a step back and looked up and was wobbly on his feet, and the daughter's hand shot out and grabbed him and she was like, "Dad, your vertigo!" 

A day at work...

...at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, where I work now:

1) We're setting up for a wedding rehearsal dinner and I get pulled at the end of the night along with my one (young) (bearded) (vaguely Jewish) (local) coworker and sent there to cut ribbons to tie up around the silverware-bundling napkins, and the (redheaded) (big personality) owner recommends a set length of a foot to try to see how it looks but we have no ruler or measuring tape or anything else like that around, so I'm like, "How do we measure twelve inches?", and as soon as she hears that, she's like, "Hey, you better be careful, or [my coworker's first name] is going to go to HR!".

And, after someone rustles up a ruler and we try that length and it doesn't work and we're trying to figure out what would and the owner suggests eighteen, I suggest fifteen, but the owner's like, "I don't think fifteen inches is enough," so we all start saying, "Oh my, [her first name] doesn't think fifteen inches is enough!", and when we say that, she just mugs a face and is like, "Now **I'm** going to go to HR!", and she just shakes her head and strides out the door to go take care of something else related to set-up for the wedding rehearsal dinner.

2) This table of a (fat) (white) (pretentiously-dressed) (bearded) (bereted) dad and his two (fat) (young) daughters and a (thin) (late 40s) (white) couple who are friends of theirs come in, and they're all talking theater, and the children especially the youngest one are some of the most ill-behaved little children that I've ever seen, like I'm walking through the door to the room where they are eating and the young one who's like eight is running full speed through it and almost knocks me over, and at the table the kids are fiddling with craft stuff and the youngest one interrupts the adult conversation to tell them that she's putting on a puppet show and everything stops so everyone can watch the creative play of this interrupting child, and they have all these little goggly craft eyes for pasting onto things that get scattered everywhere and onto the floor and they ask for to-go boxes to collects scraps and they just leave those on the table when they are leaving along with all of their other trash like the 3 red-striped paper straws that we use for shakes that they saw and wanted some of and so we brought them out to them and they had said that they were going to take them home to use them there but instead they just touched them and left them there for us to throw out, and when I take orders from the adults at one point one of the children interrupts my talking to the point where I have to stop and then begin again to say what I was saying, and at another point I hear the older child making a knowing comment about some person who's a topic of conversation and saying that they'd make a great Miss Hannigan, and then above all that when they leave one of the group gets an individually-wrapped toothpick from the little cup on the front check-out counter, and they just throw the plastic toothpick wrapper on the floor and it's sitting out there on the carpet by the front door as they walk out.

"Those kids are like Charley and the Chocolate Factory level bad," I was like, to my one (laconic) (soft-spoken) (black) (female) coworker.

"Yep," she was like.

3) My one (young) (bearded) (vaguely Jewish) (local) coworker asks if I know of any good local giftshops or shops with hats, since it's his brother's birthday coming up and he would like to maybe get him a new baseball cap, instead of the Star Wars one that he wears all the time.

Another weekend shift at work...

...at the one (Irish-y) burger joint on the first floor of a historic hotel, where I now work:

1) There's a huge catering order going out the door for after the football game, and the one reception room has tables set up with like hundreds of plastic boxes open and set up with silverware and fruit salad cups and homemade potato chips in them, and empty buns as well, which we have to fill with sandwiches.

So, as the carts of hot hamburger patties and just-cooked chicken breasts come out, the one (balded) (bearded) (hipster) husband of a waitress stands there with a spatula and picks up each burger or chicken breast and holds it up and meanwhile I've picked up an empty bun in my bright deep blue sanitary-gloved hands and I cup the meat with it and then whip back around and throw it into the box and get the next bun and we repeat, like an assembly line.

"We got some Henry Ford going here," I was like, "Except for the anti-semitism."

The guy's (overweight) (young) son is there, too, and he says that the (redheaded) (big personality) owner is "the coolest," since she has a restaurant named after her. 

2) This (fatter) (triple-chinned) (Asian-American) mom who's well-dressed but with an unfashionable haircut and a (nerdy) (kind of ugly) (white) dad who's well-dressed with an unfashionable haircut are there with their (hot) (college-age) (HAPA) son, and as I pass the table, I hear the mom ask, "But can't someone at your frat buy liquor for you?"

3) My one (young) (white) (Southern-ish) (gay-ish) coworker with the (80s style) is like, "So, I heard you had an eventful night," and then he says something about how a table wanted drycleaning from the ranch that I had spilled all over this guys sleeve and back, and I'm like "What?!", since that was the first I'd heard of it, and then he said that the table said I had spilled it when I was prebussing, and there was that table where when I had gone back to get more there were small spots of ranch on the floor as you went away from the table, but I had noticed nothing at the time or when disassembling the dishes back in the dish area, and besides I hadn't cleared over them and they hadn't said anything at the time, so, maybe it was them trying to get money out of the restaurant, or maybe I did do it, who knows, but you think someone would have seen something at the time if it was something that I really did do.

4) During the height of dinner hour the one (straggly-bearded) (thin) (white) (stoner) cook sees me talking to a (trainee) cook about something, and he snaps loudly and is like, "Hey, don't call out to anyone in the line! something something something, and I'm like, "Hey, I didn't, [a waitress's name] asked me to relay something and I stood here until someone was free and approached me," and it was this whole pissy bitchy thing, but then at the end of the night he comes up to me and apologizes and he starts using all of these therapy words and he says that it's something that he's trying to work on and he doesn't mean it and it's not him it's the situation and I was right in what I did and he was sorry etc. etc. etc., and I find it awkward, and so I thank him and say that's very nice of him, and I disengage from the situation and go to do something else.

5) As I come back into a room a second time to do something and I realize that I'm abnormally forgetting a lot of stuff, I go back out to the register, and as I'm fiddling there with the POS interface for what I need, I glance at the time, and I suddenly realize that it's like 9:45pm at night, and not like eight-thirty like I had been thinking, and that was probably why I was getting so forgetful, it had been a long and busy night and I was getting tired. 

6) As I bus home that night, a drunk (young) (Latino) guy on the seat next to me starts falling asleep and his head actually flops over on my shoulder, and some (young) (dressed-up) (female) (black) students see that and one calls out and is like, "Hey, hey, did you miss your stop?", and when he wakes up with a start, they check on him and ask him if he has a friend with him and if he knows how to get home, like they're looking after him and stuff, but he seems started awake and sober enough and so he just gets off the bus by himself and walking back a few blocks, and none of them go out with him to assist him, they had apparently done enough good deeds for the night.

A weekend shift at work...

...at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, where I work now:

1) When a lot of out-of-town people were through the restaurant for a local university function and then separately a wedding, I was chit-chatting quite a bit with a number of tables, like cluing them into local bars and businesses and things to see and even getting some people set up to use the (very convenient!) local bus system for a trip that they had to take into the heart of campus.

And, like happens occasionally, people ask me if I'm local, like I grew up there, which of course I did not.

(It's like people visit a small town set in the country, and want authentic help who are "tied to the land.") 

"But you know so much," the one (wine-drinking) (California) (white) lady was like.

"That's because I talk incessantly," I was like. "You learn a lot from people that way."

2) A gigantic table of (fuckable) bros of all ages come in, all muscles and bellies and beards and logoed team gear, and they get seated at a gigantic table in back, where they drink and are loud for just hours.

And, when I help out here and there with it, I call it "the bro table," and then "the brable" and finally "the branquet."

And, it turns out that they are just the loveliest people, like, when I was prebussing and I cleared a small plate from in front of someone, they paused their conversation to say thanks in just a really nice and heartfelt way.

"They really are just the loveliest people," my one (balding) (bearded) (pun-loving) (white) coworker was like. "Way to break stereotypes." 

3) A (white) (New Jersey) mom and sister were in town, and it came out that their son/brother was a freshman on the football team, which I later related to coworkers.

"Ours or theirs?", asked the one (young) (white) (Southern-ish) (gay-ish) coworker with (80s style).

"Ooh, good question," I was like, and then I had to think back to how they'd said that they'd be visiting town again, so it must be our team.

4) A (southwestern) pasta salad was a mistake and up for grabs, but I was busy, and like 30-40 minutes later I asked after it, and, it had been thrown out.

5) The one (short) (older) (Latina) hostess and the one (introverted) (tattooed) (white) manager are drinking at the restaurant bar after work, and all of a sudden they're looking at me, and then they volunteer that they were just talking about how I always clean the front doors and other glass before the start of weekend shifts so everything looks nice.

"It's such a nice restaurant," I'm like, "But if you walk in and there's a handprint from grease and blue cheese sauce on the door, it's just gross."

Then, I added that the little things add up. 

6) Towards the end of the night, I stopped by a table to check on them, and the (polite) (elegant) (mid-50s) (white) lady thanked me but said that "a gentleman" had already just helped her, and then my one (short) (young) (bearded) (vaguely Jewish) coworker showed up with something for their table that they had asked for.

"Oh, him!", I was like. "You had said 'gentleman' and I couldn't figure out for the life of me who you meant." 

Yard surprise.

After chopping up old tax documents with my social security number on them, I take out all my recycling to put it in the bin by the side of the house, and as soon as I open up the top to the recycling bin, I hear this skittering. clambering sound like something trying to climb on plastic, and then out of the trash bin next to it with a gnawed-off corner on its top there pops up through it the head of a squirrel, who then leaps outward and down to the ground to run away, since I had scared it when it was getting into the trash, apparently.

A story of Gen Z.

This (later middle-aged) (fat) (somewhat theatrical) (white) lesbian who does door at the new gay bar in town says that they've had a hard time figuring out which events will work and why or why not, and beyond that, even when Gen Z does show up, they like stand around and don't buy drinks.

"Uh, I'm glad you showed up," she was like, "But this is a bar, hon." 

Healthcare sliminess.

For some routine checkups that I have done yearly I had accidentally skipped a year and I started again this year like 3-4 months ago, but this time the billing seemed off, including a set of late bills that came in that insurance didn't chip in for that amounted to like $700.

So, I looked up the codes and it seemed right away like duplicate billing at least for the staff -- AMA guidelines say that you only bill out a second subordinate staffer like a nurse for their time if they spend a lot of time going over something different than the main subject of the appointment with the doctor, which was not the case at my appointment -- and my hunch was that the test was billed out twice, too, maybe from a different department.

And, I eventually got them to send me old copies of my bills from former appointments, too, only to find that at those 2 previous appointments there was 1 billing code for each thing, as opposed to the 2 per thing this time.

But, when I contacted the hospital, they were soooo slimy, pushing me to do stuff over the phone instead of email (no), saying that they never do fraudulent billing and that they did a "review" and the other bills were for like "facilities" (I think), later they said they did another review (again?) and the billing was for something like "different aspects of the same care" (you mean duplicate billing, I think?), and all the while they couldn't give me a straight answer for what the billing was actually for...  Just a scam, and I had to lay out for them twice that my options include contacting the insurer about potential health insurance fraud, as well as the state attorney general. I also had to tell them that it was astonishing that we had exchanged so many emails and they couldn't answer a simple question about what the bills were for, so the billing simply did not appear to be legitimate...  

The last I had heard they had said something about physically mailing me some result of some review, but when I responded to that email with a strongly worded email saying something like that their claims of "review" had appeared false so far and all the reasons that they had provided so far were generalities that made no sense and explained nothing and so the billing did not appear to be legitimate according to the evidence that I had provided, I got a notice in my email a few days later saying I had yet another message in my hospital messaging account from them. But, I didn't check it right away because I was busy and because this is all just so draining, and instead I decided that I'd look at it when something finally showed up in the mail (it didn't - I'm still waiting).

So, maybe they cancelled out the bills and never mailed me what they said they'd mail me, or maybe I misremembered what they said they'd do?

This is just such a timesuck, it's like they're trying to wear you down and make you accept the legitimacy of the billing and pay it to get rid of it instead of spending the time and energy and mental space fighting it.

Just such a scam, and so slimy.

It's finally on my to-do list to go open that message they sent me, and to see whatever they said.

I really hope that I don't have to write the state attorney general. 

I would also add that I don't remember companies doing stuff like this, years ago, but now I've run into billing and fraudulent stuff everywhere -- the hospital, an interstate bus service that I used, a rental car company...

It's like all of them are hostile rackets that are out to get you, instead of businesses operating in reasonably good faith that occasionally make mistakes sometimes, as happens in life.