…by a (newly-hired) (stoic-faced) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker, after one of our first few conversations and I interact with her and I respond to everything fluidly in (Spanish), albeit only on whatever simple topic that we were talking about:
“Nice Spanish,” she says, in (English).
. . .
(If you think so, I’ll take it.)
When I do jumping jacks in my living room and the ceiling lamp is on, the textured ceiling seems to abnormally bubble out towards me and then retract from me with each hop if I glance up at it mid-jumping jack, almost like I’m on LSD or something.
I think it’s because it has that grain-speckled 3D texture that casts shadows away from the light, and it’s something about how you get closer to the grains and their shadow shifts subtly on your approach simultaneously, with each hop… It’s just too much for your eyes and brain to process all at once, and so you perceive it as some type of psychedelic ballooning.
My one (professor) friend who teaches (modern) (Czech) literature has been disgusted with rich and entitled international students in recent years – she says it’s a growing trend, and a growing problem – and she’s encouraged me to speak out about it, whether to the students directly or through writing a column in a local paper or something.
Only, something like that could come off as mega-xenophobic… Just too hard to pull off no matter how delicately you address things, you’d get so much blowback if it wasn’t anonymous.
…at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, this past fall:
1) A table of a (young) (college-age) (South Asian from South Asia) couple have a $48 meal and the guy signs and turns over the bill so that you can’t see it, and then they run out of the restaurant quickly after they’re done eating and while I’m busy and can’t get to their table, which when I do I turn it over and I find out that they left a $2 tip.
And, I go to see if they’re outside so I can catch them and do my “Was everything okay?” spiel, but they’re already too far gone and you can’t catch them.
2) A table of 5 (mostly international) (undergraduate) students comes in and, apart from one (young) (Chinese from China) girl waving at me for attention when my hands are full and I’m obviously helping another table, it’s like a normal service table, one (South Asian from South Asia) girl even asking me table-side for recommendations on curry and I walk her through what she wants and the varieties that we offer, and then at the end there’s takeout boxes and that same (South Asian from South Asia) one wants me to make a second trip and go get her a special plastic take-out container from the back (no, the one that I had brought out and that she was presently scooping stuff into was fine), and then there’s 5 separate checks and we have to use the new tableside tap-to-pay mechanism for 4 of them who want that, and of those 4, like 3 skip past and choose no tip, which you can’t go back and change, so overall it's like $6 of tip on a bill that’s almost $100 because of those 3, who are 2 (Chinese from China) and the 1 (South Asian from South Asia) girl who was a little on the demanding side.
So, after that ended, I did the thing where I asked them if everything was fine, and it was, so I told them that it was too late to change because everyone used tap-to-pay, but they should know that in the future if everything is okay it’s expected to leave a minimum 15% tip at a restaurant with table service, which is what our restaurant is since we seat people and take their order at the table and bring food and checks out and whatnot, versus them ordering and paying at a counter and waiting for the food, where maybe you leave a dollar or nothing, depending.
Like, what world do you live in, where you interact decently with a tableside waiter on what dish to order, and then you leave absolutely nothing at the end, not even a single dollar?
A (white) (female) (U.S.-raised) college student at the next table who was leaving just after them must have heard, because she crossed her tip out and upped it to like $4 on her $18 bill, to make it on the generous side.
3) When my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker comes in, I tell her that after she had left early the previous night, I had been asking our one (Chinese from China) coworker and our one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones if they had any pictures of Adam Levine’s abs.
“And they said no,” I was like, “And I was like, ‘Of course not, because you’re not [the first name of my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker].”
4) Two (older) (white) women each get a curry – one red, one green – and so when I deliver them to .the table, I’m like, “Okay, one red curry, and one green curry… You guys are really getting ready for Christmas, you’re just like CVS, it’s not even Thanksgiving yet!”
And, they both laugh, and the one starts like listing off other chain businesses that also have Christmas stuff out already, like this or that, or that, or that, just listing off several businesses in a row.
5) Towards the last few hours that we’re open, a table of four (master’s student-aged) (South Asian from South Asia) people come in, three men and one woman, and they ask me what’s good from the fried rices and the girl wants to make sure her order is vegetarian, and they get a non-vegetarian crab rangoon appetizer and the guys leave one uneaten, and the guys split a chicken fried rice (Pakistani or non-Hindu Indian?) and they eat almost all of it and the girl gets a vegetarian dish and eats like a third of it, and then they get one round of dessert with mango sticky rice, and then they decide after that to get a second round of dessert with ice cream and they’re not sure whether to get one order of coconut or one order of mango and I say that I can split the flavors so it's one order but with one scoop of each, from which like a third of the mango scoop is left uneaten by the time of the end of the meal.
And, during the meal, the main guy who’s ordering doesn’t have the right phrases to say when he’s ordering, so it comes off wrong register-wise, which happens with international students.
And, when I’m at the nearby host-stand entering their meals into the system they call over from like 10-15 feet away for me to bring them straws, which I ignore as improper restaurant behavior, which is something that also happens with international students.
Only, once early on, when I’m moving into clear dishes, that same guy who's ordering nods down at the dish in front of him without looking at me and is like “Clear the dish,” which has never happened to me before at all with any customer and strikes me as off, but also maybe a manifestation of him not knowing how to interact with a waiter.
Then, when I come out with the first round of dessert, they all have all of their empty dinner plates out in front of them and plates are spread out across every inch of the table – the last trip I had made, nothing was ready to clear yet – and although both of my hands are completely full since I’m carrying dishes in each hand, it’s not even everything on a tray, that same guy all of a sudden is just staring up at me along with everyone else, and is like, “Clean the plates from the table.”
And, that is so unexpected, that I don’t even know what to do, so I stand there for a second and without thinking too much I turn and put the plates down on a nearby table, stack some of their dishes together, and then turn back and get the dessert and put it down in front of them and go and continue and stack the rest of their dirty dishes from their table to clear them away.
Then, since I’ve wondered about them – the people with the most culturally-off behavior are usually the worst tippers – I kind of hover by the nearby host-stand at the end of the meal, and since the guy who gives commands was the one taking the bill, when his friend sitting next to him gets up to go to the bathroom, I come over to refill the absent guy’s one-third full waterglass so I can glance over and see if the guy who gives commands has put down any tip yet.
And, without even looking at me, the guy says out of the side of his mouth very directly, “No more water,” like I’m a servant.
So, as soon as they’re getting up and congregating by the nearby door to leave, I go in like to check dishes and the check looks unsigned, so I grab it and I’m like, “You forgot to sign the check with the tip!”, and the guy steps over and gestures and it’s clear that the signed copy was actually underneath that – and, I look at the receipt-papers still sitting on the black plastic tray on the table, and, the tip is marked as $0, on a $54 bill.
So, I give the spiel and ask if everything is okay, and the guy says yes except the vegetarian dish, and I say that we asked if it was okay after entrees were served and then I asked if it was okay when I cleared it, and if we had known in time, we could have replaced it, since the restaurant has a policy like that.
So, as he’s like glaring, the guy comes over and changes the $0 to a $6, and leaves.
Like, what even is that, where you’re commanding someone like a servant and the waiter figures out a way to save you money and try both types of ice cream, and then you’re going to leave them nothing? Like, let’s say your friend was *that* unhappy with one dish – why wouldn’t you say something when staff asks about it multiple times, and why would you stay further to try not just one but two desserts? Just crazy.
His behavior grew quietly and it was nothing that I’d ever quite encountered before, so I wasn’t ready for it, but in the future I think I have an approach:
When someone commands, I’ll say something about how they didn’t intend it that way, but they should be careful in the future with how they request things from someone, like if they told that to a bartender about clearing a glass and her boyfriend was sitting next to them at a bar and overheard that, he could get a punch in the face.
Like, I’ll give them benefit of the doubt, and I’ll point out bad behavior like I’m helping them.
I wonder how that would go over?
…at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, this past fall:
1) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker shows me pictures from her recent trip to see Maroon 5 in concert, and she shows me this far-away picture she took of a tatted Adam Levine taking off his shirt.
“He showed his abs,” she was like.
“How do you know?”, I was like. “It’s so far away.”
And, I puffed up my belly and used my finger to trace lines across it like a six-pack.
“Maybe he has a tattoo on his belly so it looks like abs, but he doesn’t really have them.”
“You!”, she was like, at that, meaning that only I am the kind of person who would do that sort of thing.
2) When I passed by the one back-counter register, I saw the owners’ (eldest) daughter, and I was like, “[Her first name], I didn’t know you were working today!!”, and she turned around, and it turned out to be their (middle) daughter.
“See,” my (chubby) (Thai) coworker was like, “They look alike! I do that.”
“Yes!”, I was like, “But you have glasses! I have no excuse!”
I then proceeded to tell the (middle) daughter that all this meant that if she wanted, she could steal her older sister’s ID and use it for stuff.
3) When I bring a large soup-pot back to the dish-washing area because we don’t have many of them and so you need quick turn-around with washing, I ask my one (Guatemalan) coworker if he wants it here or there, pointing at each of the two sink-basins, and instead he’s like “Alli!” (“There!”), pointing to the nearby trash-bin.
4) A (fatter) (younger) (gay) (Latino) customer is in with his partner and another couple, and he asks if we have anymore special desserts like we did for Halloween.
(We didn’t.)
And, he says that he loved it, and he thinks that the owner should make more, like for Christmas and stuff, so I pass that along to her.
5) My one (younger) (taller) (Latino-American) coworker is on a hot story about a major campus business closing down, and so towards the end of shift when stuff is slowing down, he pulls his laptop out and works on the story and is messaging other campus people through Slack to figure out the state of inquiries to major proper-holders etc.
…at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, this past fall:
1) When my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones asks me which hard candy is better in the snack-tub – both she and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker had bought some new ones, and she noticed that I had set out all 3 types of new ones, to try them – I’m like, “[The first name of my (chubby) (Thai) coworker]’s, of course,” playing into the joke how I’m in love with her, since clearly I made that remark before I had even tried all of the candies.
2) When I see my one (female) (Guatemalan) coworker, she’s really showing with her pregnancy, and when we compare bellies, it’s clear that she’s already bigger.
“Ya dos anos” [“Already two years”], I was like, patting my belly, “Y mi bebe no viene” [“And my baby does not come”].
At the one conference that I went to this past fall, a presenter who was presenting some very good linguistics research mentioned some interesting things that he had found while reading a dictionary.
“Aha!”, I thought, “I’m not the only one!”
