Restaurant people (1 of 2): A monolingual customer.

The other day this (younger) (stubbled) (slightly prematurely greying) (rugged face) guy with a stylish coat and backpack came in, and he would speak into his phone and show it to me, and it turned out that he was a monolingual (Chilean) and je had come in to have lunch at the place where his friend from the local adult ed center's ESL class worked.

"Quien?", I was like ("Who?").

And, he said something like, "El guatemalteco" ("The Guatemalan"), and then he said something like, "El poquito" ("The short one"), and he made a wincing face and gestured with his chin downwards, to indicate that his friend is the (very short) guy who works in the kitchen, and who I later saw come out to say hi to him.

Overall, I tried to speak (Spanish) with him, but I kept accidentally mixing in (Romanian) -- orez for arroz ("rice"), and o for una ("a" with feminine singular nouns) -- and he kept looking at me like I was on crack whenever I did that, since it wasn't like bad (American English speaker) (Spanish), it was something else entirely, and just f*cking whack.

So, I explained to him that I study Romanian, and that it's like Italian and French and Spanish and Portuguese, and it's a daughter language of Latin.

And, he didn't know that, but he seemed intrigued, and later he said something about my language for where I come from, which I had to correct him about, since I'm not from there, I'm just an American who's studying it.

At some point, too, I also tried explaining "peanut" as "arahida," and he had to look it up and then made an "oooh" sound and was like, "Mani."

He also said that he works at the Panera Bread out by the mall, and he's been here for 8 months, and he came here for work.

When he left, for some reason he said "usted" for me (???), but I was like, "No no no no, soy un tu, soy un hombre informal, no necesitas dicer usted" ("No no no no, I'm an 'informal you,' I'm an informal person, you don't need to say 'polite you.'").

I really have no idea what the f*ck was up with that contextually, considering I was his waiter. Do people usually say "usted" to waiters?