Another day…

…at the one (Thai) restaurant that I work now, as of several months ago:

1) My one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker comes in with her two young daughters after they got let out early from school, so I go back to our odds-and-ends workbox where we keep pens and scissors and corks and stuff  and where I had put a bracelet that I had made with her youngest daughter at an event that we went to a few weeks earlier, and I slip it on so that I can wear it over to their table.

And, the youngest one notices it immediately, that I was wearing it like I had told her that I would, and she just lights up and is so excited. 

2) I think that I hear someone playing the marimba that’s part of our holiday display up towards the ) of the restaurant, only I look down the length of the restaurant and I don’t see anyone there, and it’s only when I go and help the table next to that display and a woman there is spooning ice cubes out of her glass and the metal of her spoon hits the side of the glass and makes a ringing sound, it’s only then when that happens that I hear that same ringing sound and I realize where that sound must have been coming from, all that time.

3) A group of three (late middle-aged) (STEM?) professors including one who looks very (Romanian) share a meal, and then when one of them pulls out “the T-card” and starts talking about what can get included as a professional expense, I’m like, “Oh, is that for the tea?”, referring to the tea that two of them had ordered and were drinking, only they hear that and they’re like “No,” and they don’t hear my joke at all.

4) A (fatter) (middle-aged) (white) woman with a pudgy face and glasses and curly curly blonde hair just loves our homemade salad dressing, and she is all smiles about it and just beams her big round face up at me and is like, “I could drink it through a straw.”

Signs of increasing local homelessness:

1) The local supermarket co-op does away with its seating in the covered area outside its doors, since (homeless) people had been congregating there and harassing staff and local customers.

2) The (older) (white) (female) (townie) bartender at the local brewery tells me that with the one sandwich shop that moved to a few storefronts away from them like a year ago, everyone there has been extremely happy, since they lost the homelessness problems that they had had at their last location, like people coming in and using tables and stealing bags of chips from the open racks that they had out, in addition to staff sometimes being afraid to close alone when it got quiet and they were like the only ones there, apart from the homeless people who were maybe around.

Glimpses of past selves…

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

1) I ask a solitary (brown-skinned) man if he’s picking up or dining in as he walks through the door, and as he says “For here” he devoices the final R, so I ask him if he’s (Turkish), and he seems surprised and says that yes, he is, so I’m like, ‘Two words, that’s not bad” as I go to seat him, and then as he sits down at the table I explain to him that his devoicing of finals Rs is a dead giveaway.

2) As I discuss local problems with the one (thin) (bald) (jittery) (older) (Jewish-looking) local business owner who comes in a lot, he’s in complete agreement with everything I say, and he says that I should run for office, he'd support me.

A cottage door-step surprise…

…on the first day of the new year, when I step outside to go to the basement of the front house and go do laundry:

A big brown jagged hunk sits there on the concrete slab in front of my cottage, and at first I think that it's a brick like maybe some prowler with bad intentions had put it there, somehow, but then I look more closely and it’s a dry and gnawed-up hunk of brown bread that had become vaguely block-like in shape, one presumably dropped there by squirrels who were “over it,” and so I kick it away with my flip-flopped foot and it flies towards the fence on the other side of the backyard before coming to rest under the edge of the woodpile there, and as it does that my flip-flop comes off my foot and shoots up in the air, tumbling end over end as it falls like six-to-eight feet away from me on the pathway that leads around the front house towards my cottage, as I start hopping in short stunted hops on one foot to go over to it, to fetch it.

Addendum.

A bit after this, I was talking with the one (thin) (bald) (jittery) (older) (Jewish-looking) local business owner who comes in for lunch regularly, and I mentioned how weird and even unemployable and low-life a lot of app delivery drivers are, like people who couldn’t get a job anywhere else, and how many of them come in smelling like marijuana smoke and stuff, to the point that I can smell it under my KN95 mask that I always wear at work, which is really saying something.

And, he was shocked that Doordash actually has automated driver report commands that specify things like intoxication and stealing orders and stuff, like that just goes to show you how often it must happen at places, he was saying.

A slammed evening at work.

Like a week or two before Christmas this year at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, we got totally slammed on a weekday night when it was just 3 of us working, from the moment we walked in.

And, I had picked up some specialty chocolate on sale at the local co-op and I had brought it in as a treat for everyone, and it wasn’t until like more than 3 hours into the shift that I even had a chance to open it, it was that busy…  In fact, it was so late by the time that we opened it, I wondered if we’d even have time to eat it all, since there was still some left on the plate that I had set out for the kitchen workers by the time that we starting to do our end-of-shift tasks for closing.

(“Don’t worry,” the one [older] [Thai] cook lady was like, when I pointed that out, meaning that she’d take anything that was left.)

And, even though it was busy, I was having a good time and chit-chatting with customers, like a table full of professors who were there for a business meal and who I was trying to convince to get dessert.

“What, no fried banana on the [name of the local university]?”, I was like.

But then, it wasn’t until after the rush that I found out that we actually had had two different orders stolen by two different app delivery drivers, including one by a guy who was shamelessly doing it right in front of me.

One was some UberEats guy who was waiting an incredibly long time for his order because the kitchen was so backed up, and when he finally got it, he canceled the pick-up from his end and walked out and kept it, and it wasn’t until some other UberEats driver showed up and wanted the same order that we realized what had happened.

The other one was a lot more insidious, this one (mid 30s) (dark-skinned black) (male) Doordash driver who I had seen sitting around waiting, and who when I came back to the counter was carrying a big take-out bag and asked me for a fork and napkin and so I ran behind the counter and got him one…

As we pieced it together later, when he first came in, he walked past the edge of the counter to the unpaid orders that customers place over the phone, and he was looking at that ticket when my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker saw him doing that and was like “No, go sit down, that’s not your order.”

And, he waited and got all three of his Doordash orders, walked them out to the car as we confirmed them gone, and then he came back in and waited some more, until we were all busy and no-one was by the front counter, at which point he walked over and picked up the huge order whose ticket he had looked at – it was an expensive one, too, with stuff like seafood fried rice – and then he just stood there like it was his, and when I ran by he even asked me for a fork so he’d have something to eat it with, since I’d never have imagined that he took the order like that, it only briefly crossed my mind that maybe he was being too weird and conscientious about the app order, every once in a while we get app delivery drivers like that, but I immediately thought that maybe he could just be a customer who had been waiting for his own order, too, and so rather than checking if a fork was in the bag, I immediately ran behind the counter and got him one since that was quicker and I needed to be onto the next task.

We immediately blocked him as a driver afterwards – Doordash lets you do that, although I don’t think UberEats does – and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker said we should maybe even put a photo of him on the front door saying he stole, just like they do at H-Mart.

“But then I would have to put a picture of you on the front door,” I was like. “SHE STOLE MY HEART.”

Later, too, at the end of the night, I gave her like five dollars in quarters for her laundry and she gave me a five dollar bill, and I asked her why she didn’t count the quarters that I gave her, to make sure that it was really five dollars.

“Because I trust you,” she was like.

“We trusted the Doordash driver, too,” I was like.

Restaurant people:

1) The (college-age) daughter of the (Thai) restaurant owners at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now had joined a sorority a while back, and when I ask her how that’s going, she says, “Expensive,” and she then explains that it ends up costing like $5,000 a year in totalled continual costs, which she hadn’t expected.

2) When after a day at the campus library I swing by a grocery store in the student part of town to pick up some avocados – I had run out and I needed some for my typical morning breakfast, but I didn’t have time to go to the usual grocery store near my house – I walk in and right there like two aisles in is this (early 50s) (white) couple who I know from the restaurant, who live an hour away but come through town once a week for something and so often come in to our restaurant.

“Oh, it’s our friend from the restaurant,” the wife says.

And, it turns out that their daughter has some big concert coming up and she has like four solid days of evening rehearsals, and they’re schlepping her over everyday, and they have never even been to that grocery store before, they just went there to get some shopping done while she was in rehearsal, and I say that I’ve been to that particular store before ,but otherwise it’s pretty rare that I go there, too.

“Isn’t that funny,” I was like.

And, I said that they should probably just rent an Air BnB or something and stick their daughter in it all week, she’s probably old enough and prices wouldn’t be too bad what with a lot of the students out of town, and they said that her choir teacher actually had said that she could stay with her family during those rehearsals, and maybe they would do that, for a day or two, but they weren't sure yet.

I then excused myself to go get my stuff, since I had to run that errand quick before going to meet a friend for dinner nearby.