Restaurant tidbits (5 of 5): Some customers...

...from various shifts:

1) Two (late middle-aged) (fatter) (white) ladies who are having dinner and who I confusedly also bring take-out to, since I don't have the table numbers down and since it also turns out in retrospect that the other servers shoved some tables together farther down the dining room and so that made the table numberings seem off.

"Yes, that's ours," the one was like, "I'm taking some food home for my mother."

"Cool!", I was like, "But you were the one that said that, not me take-out is take-out, I wasn't prying where it was going!"

Then, I was like, "I don't want the boss to get the wrong idea."

(They seemed to love that.)

2) A(n older) (goateed) (blue collar) (white) guy with loopy eyes coming in for lunch like right at 11am when we open, asking for a fly swatter so he can hit flies while he eats, since he says they're a problem everywhere right now and he doesn't blame us for them, but they're bothering him, and that would help.

So, I duck into the kitchen and find the owner's (permanently tired) (Thai) wife, and she gets out from back behind the prep cooks this super duper-looking fly swatter that's like a tennis racket with a couple overlaid metal meshes, and a button on the side with a red light next to it that flashes when you press it, and what looks like room in the handle for a big heavy-duty battery or two.

And, it turns out to be like a mini bug zapper, that fries the bugs when you swat it into them and press the button.

So, I give it to him, and for like the next thirty-five minutes every once in a while there's like this loud dark electricity-sparking sound ZAWP that comes rolling across the empty dining room, and the guy like calls out to us and is like, "Got one!".

3) A(n older) (single) (white) lady with a photocopied crossword, and after I break down the chicken dishes for her, I ask her if she's a puzzler, and then talk crosswords with her.

4) This group of (four) (older) (white) ladies who all order drinks and apps and main dishes and get a lot wrapped up to go, and then as they go to leave, they ask me if that bakery up the street with the good dessert breads is still there.

"Yeah," I was like, "But unfortunately they're not open on [the day that it was then]."

"Just as well," muttered the one (oldest) lady, a skinnier one with the most wrinkles and these blonde up-curls, and who's wearing a tasteful sweater.

Restaurant tidbits (4 of 5): My new line.

I texted my one old (Chinese heritage) (Filipina) coworker from my one old resthome job, to tell her about how I've still been getting fed at work, but since it's a (Thai) restaurant, it's always (Thai) food all the time.

I was like, "I now probably eat as much Thai food a week as [our Thai coworker], because she eats Thai food at home and other food at work, and I eat other food at home and Thai food at work."

And, she texted me back with a laughing response, something like, "hahahaha."

I knew she would like that joke!

It's totally her sense of humor.

Restaurant tidbits (3 of 5): Boss's wife.

Like has always been occurring since I worked for a long time in higher ed, I always inordinately fear when I start a new job that I will get arbitrarily fired for no reason at all on very short notice.

So, during my final (Thai) restaurant training shift on a Saturday night when they wanted me inside to see the food and get to know it and help pack stuff up (we have to do stuff like put bean sprouts and carrot shavings and a lime wedge on some dishes, and a cucumber slice and green onions on others), I started to get worried, since I ended up on the floor helping to bus tables and do random stuff for a very long time and so wasn't inside to help with all of that stuff, though when I ducked my head back into the kitchen when stuff had slowed down a bit and I could be back in there, they brusquely waved me out again, to go back to the floor and do whatever I was doing out there.

So, when stuff finally permanently quieted down and it was getting time for me to go, I checked in with the (Thai) owner's (Thai) wife, this (shorter) (stringy) woman with a (permanently tired) look on her face, to make sure that everything was okay.

"Because I like this job," I was like, "So if there's a problem, please let me know, so I can improve."

"Oh no," she was like, "Thank you, if you are not here, it will be big headache for me."

Also, at an earlier point in the evening, their (like middle school-age) (Thai-American) daughter was in to help at the counter, and when I went to go put a takeout bag on the table for drivers to pick up, she was like, "Excuse me, but that's unpaid, put it closer to here," since she noticed that I had mixed stuff up and wasn't following the system they have where takeout bags that are unpaid are closer to the counter, so no-one can accidentally pick them up and leave without paying.

They've also had like online order delivery drivers come up and take tips out of the tip jar, so it's also better to have those prepaid orders farther away from the register.

My first day of fall this year:

One sunny but colder afternoon  I see that the very top leaves of the tree in the yard next door are yellow, and I sink $20 to buy gems on Duolingo so that I can max out my current language course and see what that looks like, before the graphic interface massively changes on November 1st.

Restaurant tidbits (2 of 5): Eggroll sauce.

At the (Thai) restaurant where I now work, I had an evening training shift, and this (very early 20s) (stringy) (blonde) undergraduate in counselling with a very (blase) expression showed me how to pour eggroll sauce from these big plastic industrial strength jars into these little plastic cuppies for takeout.

"So is that all I need to know?", I was like.

"Yeah," she was like, "Except sometimes it's pink, and sometimes it's yellow."

And, she gave a sharp little laugh that was nonetheless somehow authentic.

"It's just like that, we really don't know why."

Restaurant tidbits (1 of 5): Coworkers.

So, at the (Thai) restaurant where I now work, there's a married couple of two (younger) (Thai) professionals, one who's finishing his STEM degree at the local university, and the other who did a corporate graduate degree in the UK and is now just working and biding time until her husband finishes her degree and they can move back home and get "real jobs."

I asked her how they met, and she said at college back in (Thailand), and then I asked her if they were both from Bangkok, and she said that she was but he wasn't, he was from the country, and so I asked her what his parents did for a living.

"Our parents do the same thing," she was like, "But it's random, we didn't know that."

And, I asked her, and it turns out that both of their sets of parents completely randomly are durian farmers, and they met through friends at college and got married completely separately from that.

"Oh," I was like. "It almost makes me think that you met through some social group at college, for the children of durian farmers, and you met there and you fell in love."

An external observation on my life:

 "Your life is always so different."

(Or something like that, as was texted to me by my one art school colleague who wears [women's] clothes, when I informed him that I had started up a new job at a local [Thai] restaurant and was not only working there a number of shifts a week, but also that I get one free basic meal per shift, so I come home any number of days a week with free [Thai] takeout, which is f*cking awesome.)