1) I was talking more with the (early 20s) (recent college grad) (Thai immigrant) woman who’s been working occasional shifts at the restaurant for extra money on top of her day job, about which I began to ask her some questions, then, since it was slow and I really didn’t know what it was.
As it turns out, she’s like a low-level beginning assistant at what’s like a miniature food factory laboratory, where bigger corporations take out contracts to make industrial-like batches and experiment with ingredients and outputs, but not at the factory-level scale, since if they did that, they’d lose money in case something wasn’t quite right.
“Why did you enter this field?”, I was like.
And, she said it all came from watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory back when she was in second grade, especially this one scene where they show a machine squirting chocolate into a vast set of molds that makes the individual candy bars.
“So did you cook a lot as a kid?”, I was like.
And, she said that she didn’t, since academics are so hard in (Thailand) that you have to focus on that a lot when you’re in school, but the interest was always there.
“Oh,” I was like, “And here I started imagining that you had started a business when you were in high school, mixing Adderall with chocolate and selling it to all your friends.”
And, she laughed.
“Yeah,” she was like, “Or Molly.”
Then, she was like, “And THC. And cocaine.”
2) Towards the end of the night, a four-top of like (30s and 40s-ish) (white) people come in and I can hear a (German) accent and a (dark-haired) (thick-eyebrowed) (clean-shaven) (white) guy in shorts say “genau” (‘exactly’) about something as they go to sit down, so when I serve them appetizers, I make sure to say “Guten Appetit” (like the [German] equivalent of ‘bon appetite’).
And, at that, they just take that in stride, and don’t make anything of the fact that their waiter at a random-ass (Thai) restaurant on the prairie was trying to speak (German) to them.
Then, at the very end of their meal when I was over at the table doing something, I asked them if they worked at the local university or were visiting or what, and it turns out that the (thick eyebrow) guy works at the university, and the rest were here to visit him.
“And where are you from in Germany?”, I was like, and at that point the one (woman) said she was from the west of Germany, Cologne, but she has lived in Vienna for years, and the rest of them were actually all (Austrian) and they all know each other from Vienna.
“Yes, Austria, the smaller country that people forget,” one of the other guys says, carefully and haltingly.
“Oh,” I was like, and I then self-revealed that I was actually applying for (Romanian) dual citizenship and maybe in the next year I might be a citizen there and therefore a citizen of an EU country, at which point they all started burbling “Oh that’s nice” etc., but then I was like, “You know, Austria has not been very nice to Romania about Schengen,” at which point they all suddenly turn away from my gaze and cast down their eyes, and someone muttered something about “Oh, maybe that will get better.”
“This is the moment that I reveal that I spit in your food,” I was then like, and like a small ripple of movement went through them and they seemed even more disconcerted, and still continued to not meet my gaze.
(They all left like 18-22% tips, on their four individual checks. I had heard the one trying to total and be like “sieben dollar” [‘seven dollars’] and at that point I leapt in and showed them where the individual totals for 15% and 18% and 20% are automatically printed at the bottom of each tab. Either Austrians are naturally nice that way or they were trying to compensate for their racist backward government’s resistance to the inclusion of Romania and Bulgarian in the Schengen Zone, and in either case I approve of them and like them for that, at least these four individual people or rather the three of them that were Austrian.)
. . .
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