Developments at my Bar Job (1 of 4): Customers.

So, at my new bar job, I had some fun customers for my first shift being a server in over a decade, which happened to be a double on Christmas Eve:

1)      This younger (hispanic) guy and his mom, for a late lunch after Christmas shopping… I had told them to be kind to me since they were my first table in over a decade, and they left a $10 tip with note saying “10 dollars for 10 years of good luck” or the like.

2)      With this one (older) (black) lady, her son, her granddaughter, and the granddaughter’s 2 kids, also in for a late lunch after Christmas shopping, I got the 2 women to get half-price brightly-colored fruity martinis, and then I tried to get them to get seconds.

 
“All the goodness half the price, what’s not to like about that?”, I said, and the (older) (black) lady liked that.

. . .

Also, although she wasn’t technically my customer, one other customer at the bar was this (older) (hispanic) lady in a silver sequined Santa hit, who got loaded on half-price martinis.

I complimented her on the hat, and we chit-chatted in between my customers.

The restaurant was overstaffed and I was cut early since I was one of the people working a double, but I only got one table on the second half of my shift, which brought my wages down to just below minimum wage, I think, though all my tips were over 20%. 

Oh well, that will get worked out in the future, I bet, to where there's less people and I start getting like $15 an hour at least for every shift, when you average it out.

My Christmas: Review.

So, my Christmas day potluck with my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend and a couple of his friends was fun.
 

Of his friends, one was (Bangladeshi) and the other (Indian), and we had the potluck in a professor's big apartment where the one was catsitting for her advisor.

His (Indian) friend made some perfectly made basmati rice, and brought this (North Indian) dish with like pinto beans or something perfectly spiced and half falling apart, which you put over the rice so it was almost like a thick pinto bean stew over rice.

Also, at some point, she and his (Bangladeshi) friend started talking about how they really didn’t know what celery was until they came to the United States.

“We just don’t have it at home!”, said the one (Indian) friend.

The (Bangladeshi) friend also was talking about how she had this one class on culture when she first came to the U.S., and there was a quiz question asking why people on diets would eat a lot of celery.

She didn’t know what celery was, and so she went and asked the TA, who gave her a hint about how it was a vegetable that was “green and crunchy and had a lot of water and so not a lot of calories” – that is, practically the answer to the question.

 She was very appreciative of that and has always remembered it, she said.

Also, at one point, my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend started talking about how there aren’t many Mexicans in the UK.

“Back home if you find out someone’s Mexican, it’s very exotic, you know, panpipes and all that,” he was like.  “Not at all like here, where they’re a dime a dozen.”

He then added that when he first got to the U.S., he was always very amazed when someone said they were from Mexico, but then after a while he “got over it.”

Also, both he and his (Indian) friend had both heard (young) (Muslim) women in veils say, when they were asked if the veils weren’t hot, that “hell is hotter.”

Also also, he reminisced how about back in the Sudan some of his family are very into this local Sufi holyman, who never eats, and when he does eat, he vomits it out again immediately and all the cats gather to eat his vomit.

Also, once his cousin was there when everyone was working on a construction site and this big storm was approaching, and the holy man just clapped and the storm went away.

 His cousin saw it.

Later, we played Scrabble, and I tried to convince everyone that I could lay tiles just outside the grid, since the rules said you just had to lay tiles “on the board” (not “within the grid”).

No one accepted that, but I won anyways, by six points (it was close), and during the course of play was able to play the words “DUNG” and “POO” as actual point-getting maneuvers, not as me being a smartass.

My one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend had also tried to convince everyone that you should get double points for Christmas-themed words, and had offered help to his (Indian) friend in forming words if she’d give him “ten percent” of the points that she made from the play.

She thought that was hilarious.

The (Bangladeshi) friend had left by that point, since it was already late, and we didn't get done playing Scrabble until after midnight.

Reminder to self:

I need to avoid eating my typical snacks of apples and oranges on rough mornings.
 

The other morning, I had worked a full day at the library the previous day, then hit the gym for weightlifting and went out for (multiple) drinks with an art school colleague to discuss unionization, only to get home after midnight and eat and get to bed after one, and then not get a full night’s rest because of the noisy kids upstairs, who were up and about from seven through past eight in the morning.

So, that morning was a bit rough, but I had breakfast with extra coffee, did some cleaning at home, and biked in to work another full day at the library.

After a couple hours working, I went to get a new pull list, and so I had an apple and an orange as snacks while I was down in the office area.

After a bit shelving on the new floor, though, I started getting queasy, what with the stuffy air and me getting up and down a lot to shelve books.

All of a sudden, I started erping and needing to go the bathroom, so I went and took a nice big shit.

Then, I went back to pull books some more.

Then, after me getting up and down a lot in that stuffy air some more, I started erping again, and more heavily, almost like I needed to vomit, and so I stopped working and quickly walked to the restroom in the stacks, only to see this one (elderly) (male) (Japanese) librarian who I see sometimes but have never talked to, in a pale yellow sweater and shelving books right outside the restroom door where I had hoped to kneel by the toilet and start hacking loudly and maybe vomit.

 

So, I headed around to the bathroom by the reading area.

There, the bathroom was empty, so I knelt down and erped a few times, nothing coming up.

Then, one gasp of air, and I leaned over and this pulp of orange and apple just poured out of my mouth, and it tasted like a warm citrus fruit salad, with only a hint of tang from bile around the edges, just barely.

After that, I tried shelving books some more but didn’t feel too well, so I went down and talked with my supervisor and ended up going home for the day.

I can’t entirely figure out why I didn’t feel well all of a sudden, since I had already been working a couple hours.

As far as I can figure, it must have been the change in air and getting that fruit on my stomach on a rough morning when I was groggy and had a bit too much strong coffee.

Library Job Tidbits: Cookies, Books, Morale.

1)      During the holidays, someone in the library back offices would leave out a box of candy, and once a box of really high quality homemade Christmas cookies.

With the homemade Christmas cookies, one of the four kinds was “Julia Child’s madeleines”, as a handwritten index card set in there said, and another was “Connecticut Strippers – don’t Google!!!”.

2)      My supervisor has to flip through all of the pulled books before they get sent off for scanning.

He said it’s fun a lot of times to see the obscure stuff people have written books on, though it was less fun when the project got to the part of the library with treatises on venereal diseases, with pictorial insets.

3)      When I was training, one of my coworkers, this quirky biracial undergrad, advised me to come back and get a new pull list if I found myself in a section with a lot of misshelved books where I was spending a lot of time hunting but couldn’t find anything.

“Why?”, I was like.  “Don’t those lists have to be gone through too?”.
 
“That’s what I thought when I first started working,” he was like.  “But you get demoralized.”

Bar job (6 of 6): Great icebreaker!

At one of our last training sessions, the corporate trainer had us say our names and staff positions again, and then for the icebreaker part of the introduction, to say what our favorite drunkfood is.

I was one of the first people up, and I said Ramen noodles with a hardboiled egg.

(It's true.)

He said that was surprisingly healthy, and it def. was interesting to hear what people had to say.

A few girls would bake cookies or brownies when drunk and put ice cream on it, and one (white) guy said he always would go to this one particular taqueria and get beef tongue (!) tacoes.

Also, a kitchen manager of pretty normal weight would get two takeout hamburger specials and eat it all.

"And you drink two sodas?", someone called out and asked.

"Yes," he was like, and he was dead serious.

Bar job (5 of 6): 4 coworkers ~

1) A (Colombian) woman who's monolingual, and who works in the back and who I started speaking my poor Spanish with.  We've started giving each other basic lessons on the language that we need to work on.

2) A (Mexican) line cook who I asked him how his weekend was, and he said he spent it with his dog, and when I asked him what kind of dog he has, he said a pit bull.

3) A (short) (amicable) (early 30s) (white) guy who was coming to training after his 7am-3pm non-profit workday, since he said that he got dumped by text and so he figured he'd become a workaholic.

4) A smiley (mid-20s) (Latina) woman who turns out was in the Marines and quit her last bar job since she got hired in by the owner's son but the owner was always dick to her whenever he was around, and every time he was like that, she'd think to herself, "I should just drop kick him right now." ...

She said that every time she worked at the last bar that she worked at, too, she'd tell security that if there was a fight and they needed help, she had their backs.

So, I always bring up her Marines experience every time I see her, and when I saw her at the start of a job training session once and I asked her how many people's bones she had broken since the last time we saw each other, she was all smiley and was like, "One and a half.  One guy's bones I broke, but the other, it was just a fracture."

Bar job (4 of 6): Overheard 2 (young) (black) (female) coworkers talking.

So, every night during our ridiculous amount of job training, we had to clean up the restaurant right before we went home.

After the group broke up and everyone was finding that work to do, I overheard one of my (young) (black) (female) coworkers go up another (young) (black) (female) coworker with a mop and bucked and ask her to help clean the restroom.

"Why don't you go ask the other black girl?", she was like, and then after a short "straight man"-type joke pause she started laughing.

. . .

I find it interesting that of the group of 30+ people, the both of them had probably looked around and counted up how many (black) (female) people there were.

They must have.