...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:
1) A(n older) (shorter) (white) (shuffling) (wide-eyed and unblinking) (seemingly developmentally-disabled) app delivery driver comes in and there's a long time until the order is ready, like he doesn't know the system yet and left too much time to come get it, and then his car won't start, and he comes back in and asks us if we have cables and can jump him, which we don't and so we can't, and then he has to call up the app and get on hold a while to figure out what to do, and eventually he comes back in like twenty minutes later and hands us back the take-out, and eventually like twenty minutes beyond that another driver comes to take it away, and later we can see him through the front windows, and someone else has come with cables to come and jump his car.
2) The one (middle) (Thai-American) daughter of the (Thai) restaurant owners comes in in a sports jersey from her high school, and it has her name on the back, and the (Thai) last name is sooooooo long, like (Thai) names tend to be, only it looked even longer since it was crammed onto a jersey and she's so petite.
"It would be cool if they started your last name on your left arm, ran it across the back, and finishing it on your right arm," I was like.
And, she laughed, and she said they actually had to shrink the font in order to make it fit on the back.
3) When it turns out that it's the birthday of my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones -- the owners bring in a(n ice cream) cake for everyone -- I say that I should give her the word search puzzles that my mother clips out for me and mails me so that I have something to do at work, and which she does sometimes too, only she says that I can't give her a gift that someone else gave me.
4) When a (young) (South Asian) couple who are just friends finish up eating like 8:45pm one night and are lingering at the table in order to wait for a bus and I go to clear some plates, I notice the bill sitting out, and since it doesn't seem signed, I remind them to do that before they leave, only for the (woman) to say she did sign it and she shuffles the paper to show me, and I see one dashed-off mark on the signature line at the bottom and no numbers at all written above it, like meaning she just signed quickly and left no tip.
So, I do what the (Thai) owner suggested, and was like, "Oh no, was everything okay, my manager will see that and wonder if the food is bad or if I did something wrong," etc. etc. etc., and both of their heads snapped back and they seem surprised and like they caught on, and they assured me that everything was fine as I can see the thoughts forming in their head like they're beginning to get a clue, and when I left the table I could see them picking up the bill and starting to write on it again.
(As I see when I return after they leave, they eventually left $4 on the $46 tab, which is much better than the initial $0.00.)
5) My one (tall) (new) (Thai) coworker tells me that she came here to stay with her mother because she broke up with her husband of five years who cheated on her, and he was a (Brazilian) (minor league) (soccer) player she met back when he was a customer who came into the bank where she worked.
. . .
(On another occasion we talk more, and it turns out that like all of his [soccer] friends of his that she met he's [Afro-Brazilian], and his family lives in a dangerous area of Rio, and that she noticed from him and from when they visited that all of the family members there were in broken families or families where people had cheated, like he had "three moms," and that everyone there was encouraging their kids to play soccer, since they saw that as the way you could make it big and make money... I told her that maybe it wasn't so much that [Brazilians] cheat, but maybe it was a celebrity culture thing, for people who got into sports, and she didn't disagree, but she also said that she can't stand [Brazilians] now.)
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