Another post-Christmas shift…

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

1) There’s a small wreath hung over a thermostat on the middle of the big wall where the most tables are, that wasn’t there before Christmas.

2) My one (younger) (taller) (Latino-American) coworker comes in and he didn’t have time to do his hair before work, and it’s all rumpled and blown out like some kind of 70s man, and everyone comments on it all night, with me even saying that he just needs a dress and makeup and some pearls and he could be a New York Doll, which reference he doesn’t get and so I make him cue up their debut album on his BlueTooth.

3) Two (very gay) (grad student-age) customers are in – a (taller) (skinny) (white) guy and a (shorter) (broad-built) (bearded) (black) guy – and when I walk them through the alcohol choices, I recommend the hot sake, which they go for, and at which I whip out my usual joke, that it’s the most alcohol per dollar and so I call it “the fraternity and sorority option,” which they’re amused by, especially the (shorter) (black) guy.

Later, too, they order another bottle, and so when I’m checking on them well after that, I ask again if they’re okay with the sake and they hesitate and seem profoundly unsure about ordering another one but they also seem to be leaning towards no, and so before I even know what’s out of my mouth, I’m like, “Are you sure you guys don’t need a third?”, though thankfully they didn’t notice what I had just said.

4) I ask my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones if she specially picked out for me the lavender scent of the bathroom scent diffuser that she got me for Christmas because I once brought her back lavender honey from a trip that I took to go visit my parents and so she knows that I like lavender, and she says no, she got the same gift for everyone and they were different scents and she just assigned them randomly.

5) My one (Chinese from China) coworker fills me in on the recent mailbox thefts from his building where they caught on videotape a guy bundled up in a hoodie opening up their apartment maibox apparatus with a stolen post office key; he had been into the main post office in town and the police hadn’t gotten them the report yet, but the postmaster there said that it was probably the key that was stolen last summer when a local mailman got held up, since it can open the post office boxes all around town.

6) The one (college-age) (insecure) (fat-faced) (female) (Korean-American) customer who often gets takeout from us and sometimes dines in was in with several of her friends, and I didn’t help her table, but I notice that she ordered her extra limes for her pad thai in advance, since the last time I helped her we ahd brought out her pad thai and only at that point did she ask for extra limes, which I at that time had gotten her, but I had also said that she could order them at the time of ordering in the future, and that way she wouldn’t have to wait for them, in the future.

7) Two (college-age) (white) girls come in and it’s super cold and the one asks about if we have liquor, and I card them and the one says she forgot hers and the other says she has to go to the car, and I say it’s fine, I won’t make them go outside in this weather, and they’ve never had hot sake before and so I bring them samples in the little cups and they like that and so they order a bottle, and later they’re going to order another bottle but the one has to get going and they don’t have time for a whole one and so I offer to get them a half bottle and pro-rate the price, which they take me up on, and when they leave, they both leave huge tips.

Addendum.

A number of weeks after this shift, despite having worked many shifts with her in the interim, I see my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker, and she has that same kind of lopsided bow in her hair, only this time it's black.

And, I realize that she must have ordered a set of them in various colors from online somewhere, or found them in a store.

One post-Christmas shift…

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

1) When a(n early middle-aged) (white) couple who I vaguely recognize order a bottle of pinot grigio, I’m like, “One each?”

2) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker has this piece of (dingy grey) fabric sticking up from the back of her head, and when I get closer to her and look, I can see that it’s an off-center bow that’s resting on the back of her head with only one half of the bow sticking up so it’s visible if you happen to be looking at her far off from the front.

So, I reposition it for her, only for her to reposition it back later, as she tells me that that’s her style.

3) When I go back into the kitchen later on the shift, this radio they brought in is playing some (Latino) music, so I do some salsa-like moves when I move through the aisle between the small preparation counter for take-out and the island where meals are put after cooking and before we serve them.

And, several of my (Guatemalan) coworkers notice and chuckle, so later when I’m by my one (Guatemalan) coworker who we started the diablo joke with and the one (Guatemalan) dishwasher who practices (English) with me, they’re like, “Dance, dance!”, at which I stop by the ice machine, put my hands on it, and throw my butt out like I’m about to twerk, which they certainly do not expect.

A farewell event…

…for the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) who I know from around town:

1) On my way to his lecture, I’m in my new (synthetic fabric) (khaki) workpants that I had bought for work but never wore, and they’re super slick, and every time the busdriver hits the break, I slide halfway off my seat on the bus.

2) At the research center event, there’s some breakfast stuff left out on the coffee table for the earlier lectures from that morning, and they have these miniature bagels that almost look like dog treats.

In the lunch boxes, too, they have these strange small individual plastic bags filled with apple slices, and I hold them up to various (Brazilian) people who I know there and am like, “This is a metaphor for capitalism," and one comments that that product is "very American."

3) Since his lecture is about designing industrial systems for resilience and he keeps talking about pipes all the time, just going on and on all the time about pipes and the various parameters of pipes, I want to ask a question during the Q&A if it’s ever possible for pipes to be too big or too stiff, but I don’t.

4) When I skip out on the afternoon lectures to run an errand, I’m in the local library and then stop off at their restroom by the main entrance, and there’s dirty footprints coming out from a stall and leading to a trashcan by the restroom’s entrance, and the footprints are the heaviest there and and not where they began, and there’s no footprints leading into the room at all.

5) At a post-lecture social event, I become acquainted with a (gay) (male) (Brazilian) grad student who studies animal science and in particular industrial farming, and so I ask him his opinion on bestiality, which he does not really have, but he says growing up his cousins fucked sheep.

He also says that the quality of fast food is probably indeed growing worse and it’s not just everyone’s imaginations, since it’s likely corporations mixing in fillers and while they may lose some customers, they make more money overall, and that’s probably just what’s been happening.

6) At a bar that we go to after ) post-lecture social event, we start talking about hazing rituals for fraternities and sororities, and his (larger) (curly blond-haired) (female) (artist) friend says that one local sorority makes pledges strip down and sit on a dryer that’s running, and all of the sisters there pick up sharpies and surround the naked pledge and circle anything on her body that jiggles.

7) At that same bar, I learn that lime juice sitting on your skin can cause nasty sunburns, and so usually (Brazilians) pre-squeeze limes and bottle the juice if they’re going to be going to the beach and drinking caipirinhas (sp.?) there, since there’s less chance that way that you’ll accidentally get lime juice all over your hands and arms and body and whatnot like if you had squeezed the limes on-site.

8) At yet another bar after all of this, the one (nerdy) (worked out) (visiting STEM Ph.D. student) (Brazilian) shows me pictures on his phone of his boyfriend of 6 years who died in a car crash in his arms 11 months earlier, and he says that he decided to go ahead with his study abroad because he had decided that he needed to start living again, and suddenly I re-read all of our past handful of interactions and I realize that above his nerdiness and his less-than-ideal (English) much of his being occasionally out-of-touch with what’s happening around him is likely due to profound, profound trauma, and that my one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) acquaintance had always been inviting him to things and always taking him out to things to get him out and among people, while at the same time not telling anyone of his tragedy so as to allow others to treat him normally and give him the ability to self-disclose or not what has been happening with him.

Addendum.

When we were talking about how Luigi apparently gotinto a fight with (Thai) ladyboys, somehow it came up that the “come here” gesture in (America) means “Let’s fight” in (Thailand), so my new theory was that Luigi was perhaps attempting to genially call the ladyboys over to him for some reason, and they interpreted that as an invitation to fight and so they jumped him.

I mean, you have to wonder.

Some coworker tidbits:

1) A (perpetually stressed-out) (space cadet-y) (white) (female) (grad student-ish) delivery driver pops through the restaurant and gets water for take-out, and when I say that I haven’t seen her, she says she messed up the last two deliveries of the night because she was so sleep-deprived during exams and that got her fired, but when I raise that whole thing later with the (white) (female) (townie) delivery driver, she says that that’s not the whole story, the whole story is that she messed up the second order and it was the last one of the night and the (Thai) (husband) restaurant owner called her about it and she answered the phone by being like, “Why are you calling me?”, and he fired her as soon as he heard that.

2) The (newer) (New Age-y) (younger) (light-skinned black) (female) coworker is increasingly proving out-of-it and even a bit ADHD, what with her leaving plates on the dishrack and going to do other things but not coming back to put them in the dishtubs underneath; and what with her pouring two glasses of wine from two different bottles and air-pumping the one and putting it back but not the other, instead leaving it uncorked on the countertop; and what with her taking people’s silverware when they come in and just putting it at a heap at the foot of the table where she’s standing, instead of trying to lay it out roughly where each person is sitting; and what with her stopping helping dine-in customers and not getting them a new glass of wine when an app delivery driver comes through the door, but somehow also adding the glass of wine to the bill so that not only do we have to get the table their glass of wine later but we have to readjust their bill at the end of the night because we both put the glasses on and overcharged them; and what with her hovering by the host stand with a bill printed and two take-out boxes pulled out and ready for a table sitting by the front window nearby, only for her to go away and leave that stuff all out there and someone else has to bring them the bill, and to boot they ate all their food and don’t need any takeout boxes anyways.

Plus, when we’re discussing Luigi Mangione later that night, she comes over and joins our conversation, and she has never heard of him, nor of the United HeatlhCare CEO assassination in the first place, although she disputes whether he's really an assassin because no-one's saying that someone paid him.

3) When I leave out for my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker $5 in quarters for her to take for her coin-operated washer-and-dryer that she uses, I tuck it into a note that says “FOR [her first name],” which note she takes and writes in the same way “FOR [my first name],” putting the five dollar bill in there so I’d find it that way in the place that I’d left it.

A local peculiarity:

A few streets north of me the sidewalk turns to a narrow inset-brick pathway, and it goes beneath the incredibly low-hanging boughs of this one tree, that dip down to like five-and-a-half feet off of the ground or so.

And, at that point of the sidewalk, you can tell that people swung out and walked on the lawn towards the curb rather than ducking and going underneath those boughs and continuing to walk on the sidewalk, because there’s a pathway worn through the grass.