Odd customer interaction.

The other week at the (Thai) restaurant, this table of two (white) women came in very late in the afternoon, one woman round and with frizzy hair and vaguely (Native American) patterned clothing, and the other thin and drawn in a (purple) sweater and with a distinctly confused look on her face.

My coworker handled the order, but then later they called me over, and they asked me if there was any other type of sauce for the spring rolls, and the thin woman had a few pills out on the table and kept stammering, and she kept mentioning something about how she was "sensitive" to peanut sauce, and I said that I didn't know of any other sauce that people used with them, but then I listed some sauces like egg roll sauce and sweet-and-sour sauce, and I offered to get them for her, but she said she was "sensitive," and she kept pointing to the top of the spring rolls where bits of peanut were visible, and so I offered to take them back and get them off her bill.

"What happened," my one (Thai) (newlywed) coworker asked when I came back, and I told her, and she said that the woman put the sauce on top of the spring rolls like that herself, it doesn't come like that, and then she asked what she had said exactly, and I kind of repeated, but then I just said that she just seemed confused, and she even had some pills out on the table.

And, she said that she must be, since she asked about the spring rolls, and she told her what they were, and that they came with peanut sauce.

Later, after she interacted with the table more, she told me that that woman did seem very confused.

Then, finally, on the way out, as the two women were leaving and I said bye pleasantly, the thin woman tried to apologize as she left, but she couldn't get the words out, and all of a sudden it clicked for me that she must have had a stroke and it had affected her linguistic capacity, and that she talked like one patient who had had that who I knew back briefly when I worked at that one retirement village.

And, I told my coworker that.

"I bet when you said the word 'peanut,' she heard it, but she couldn't process it cognitively," I was like. "She must have had a stroke, I bet that was it."

Those women tipped like 20%, by the way.