Three neighborhood happenings…

…this spring:

1) Looking out my cottage window, something catches my eye in the yard, and it’s a squirrel turning himself around over and over again in the dust in the bare space beneath the outdoor table that sits out in the middle of the front house’s backyard, and there’s like grooves in the ground there where he’s doing it, perhaps from so many dust-baths, or perhaps from some natural phenomenon conducive to creating grooves in the ground in which a squirrel can take a dust-bath.

2) As I leave the one local brewery with a plate of like three cupcakes left over from a birthday party there, I see from afar some people gathered outside the local music bar to smoke and gather before leaving in a group or whatnot, so I cross the street to go offer food to them, and the group by the curb is like six-to-eight (dressed up for a night out) (college-age) females who are out celebrating one’s twenty-first birthday – “I just had my first legal drink!”, the (white) (blonde) birthday celebrant is like, over-exuberantly – and anyhow they are stoked to take the cupcakes that I offer, and when they ask and I explain to them where they came from, the one (Asian-American) one just smiles and nods her head in satisfaction and is like, “I love that,” and she then explains that they’re all in this environmental-focused major, so it’s great, they all hate food waste, and like two of them who seem decently drunk are already grabbing the cupcakes and unwrapping the paper from around their bases in order to devour them when their Uber arrives, and they continue to do that as they all start stepping into the Uber, like both unwrapping the cupcakes and trying to step into a car at the same time, all while in short skirts and wearing high heels.

3) In the yard of the new-ish neighbors on the corner who turned their backyard into an open-air kennel where they keep up to 3 dogs at a time who are sometimes barking nuisances to the point where I’ve kept records and truthfully reported them to animal control twice over the course of one year for noise violations, there’s now like heavy black plastic tarps covering most of the wire fence, so that the animals cannot easily see passer-bys or other dogs as they pass by, so they bark less.

Some odd customers all in one day…

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

1) When I deliver a salad to a(n older) (white) couple, the lady looks at her salad and immediately asks me to bring out a side of ranch dressing, after saying dryly but somehow in-your-face, “There’s not much ranch on the salad.”

2) At a three-top of two (white) moms and their (developmentally disabled kid), the one mom requests more ice for her drink, and then adds, “This drink isn’t cold,” and later they ask me for two to-go boxes but don’t use the one, and when I give my spiel about how we can’t reuse it so do they want to take it with them or do they want me to throw it out, she’s like, “Oh, just throw it out.”

3) From these four (late 20s) (white) women sitting in the lounge area, including one in short short jean shorts and a t-shirt that’s too tight on her, one of them wants to know if we have this one cocktail with crème de menthe like she once had somewhere, only she can’t remember what it was, and so she asks me if I could get the bartender to put together those ingredients, and when I go to ask that of my one (middle-aged) (white) (remarried) mom coworker who’s the bartender on duty that night, she’s just bluntly like, “No,” and then she explains and says, “Because that would taste like toothpaste.”

Work…

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

1) At a big chaotic table of (white) women and their (white) daughters, my one (white) (young) (gay-ish) (ponytailed) coworker steps in to help them when they need to-go boxes, and he asks them how many, and the one (mom) says “Oh, just bring a stack,” and so he brings a stack of 6 for the like 8-10 of them at the table, and they end up using just one.

So, when I clear the table, I’m asking them if I can clear food, and when it’s clear that they’re not taking any more food with them, I’m like, “Because these were on the table, we can’t reuse them now. Would you like to take them with you, or would you like me to throw them out?”

(Some people... That was at least a few bucks worth of stuff, which really cuts into the profit margin from the table, besides being so wasteful.)

2) At  a small chaotic table of like four people, the one (Asian-American) girlfriend who picks up the tab slips a giftcard behind her credit card without telling me when she hands me the bill, and so I run the bill on the credit card and it’s only then that I see the giftcard, so I have to go get a manager to void the transaction so I can re-run the bill with the giftcard.

And, when I bring it to the table along with the receipt showing the voided transaction, she says she knows, since credit card transactions show up on her space-age internetted watch and she got notices for both times that I ran it, and she says this a little bit suspiciuosly, like wondering why I wasn’t on top of my job to see that giftcard there in the first place.

3) Everyone is kind of mopey at work from how the local university lost in the big recent athletic tournament, so I’m like, “You know, we should really call it March Sadness,” and multiple coworkers comment to me that that’s a joke like my one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker would make, and he does in fact love that joke when I get around to telling it to him.

A recent-ish dream:

A number of months ago I dreamnt –

I’m opening this container of leftover aglio-et-olio spaghetti or whatever the f*ck you call it, some that I’d kept in a glass container for serving and then for keeping in my fridge for reheating later, and as I wash out the stray pieces of spaghetti from the side of the container, it becomes clear that there’s entire layers of spoiled spaghetti still left at the bottom, somehow, and it’s like spaghetti that had stuck together in the pot during boiling since I didn’t stir it up enough or add enough oil to the water or whatever when I boiled it, and as I go to get it out it becomes clear that there’s more and more of it just there at the bottom of the container, just wasted, and somehow I never knew that that much of it had gone bad.

 . . .

(. . .)

A problem worker…

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

Digging through my work bag, I find a menu that had been given to me so I could look through and memorize it somewhat, as well as some tax withholding paperwork in the center of it that I had filled out and never returned.

So, the next time that I work, I ask about the paperwork and they tell me to duck into the office where liquor is kept and put it on the desk of the one (short) (perky) (daytime) manager, and then I hand over the menu to the one (introverted) (white) (tattooed) manager since the menu by now is slightly different in the salads section and needs a new sheet, and she just sighs and gets this exasperated look on her face and is like, “Ugghhh, I already swapped out eighty of these!”

A problem customer…

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

This one (darker-skinned) (Jewish?) (Latin American) (Latina) is known from a past table where we had brought out the two (smaller) plates of french fries and the requested number of ketchups only to be informed that the ketchup wasn’t enough, and when we ask how many more they need, she’s like, “Bring one for everyone!”, which would be 18 cups of ketchup since they had a huge group, and so we check who still wants some from the people who are eating the two (smaller) plates of fries which are only sitting at one end of the big long table, and it ends up being that they only need 2 more cups of ketchup.

And, this time around she’s there as part of another large group although not quite as large, and it’s her birthday, and people are drifting in and drifting in, and when I go to fill water and pre-bus and ask if they need anything, she says imperiously that someone hasn’t ordered yet, and so I go and take their order right away, and then I check with the point-person for the table and I find out that that person had just only gotten there a few minutes ago.

And, when I return with other stuff for the table, that lady makes a point of pointing out that this person never received any water, even though I had just been at the table checking if people needed anything else and had even gone so far as to take the dinner order for that particular person right away, at which point I could have gotten a water for her, too.

(It was one of those tables that was so big and with so many waters sitting around that you just didn't know which one was whose, especially because in situations like that friends tend to get waters for their other friends before they arrive and they just sit out there for them.) 

Later, too, she sends back her burger, and since she’s full on salad, she has the new one boxed up to take home with her.

“Please can you take over this table,” my one (middle-aged) (white) (remarried) mom coworker asks me with just tiredness in her eyes, since she was the point-person for that table.

And, I tell her that our one (skinny) (bearded and balding) (pun-loving) coworker had helped them last time when the ketchup thing happened, and he had said it was a table where you just “smile and say yes," a phrase he said with this big put-on shit-eating grin on his face.

(The next time I work with him I mention that table and I tell him that "that ketchup lady was in here again," and he’s like, “Oh yes, I remember her!”.)

During the last part of the night, too, I am back at their table to refill water, and I reach out to get a glass and one long curly wisp of her hair that was sticking out way way away from her head gets caught between my fingers as I reach out to get the glass of the person sitting next to her, and she kind of startles and looks but doesn’t say anything and I just keep doing what I’m doing and try to ignore it, hoping that it doesn’t turn into “a thing.”

(It doesn’t, fortunately.)

Addendum.

I've had customers ask me if we make the pre-made desserts there.

"Actually not," I'm like, with a small and discreet side-grimace of my mouth,"We get them from a bakery," judiciously finding a word for whatever factory they came out of, since that factory indubitably involves baking at some level and thus I'm not really lying, I don't think, am I?