A forgotten exchange at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

Like right after that week when the owners were on vacation and did a last-minute schedule change where I missed seeing that I was suddenly working on one day and that my shift had changed to an earlier start time on another, I was working and there were a series of very (high demand) (low tip) (often South Asian from South Asia) tables.

“See, this is karma because I made a mistake and I didn’t work when I was scheduled,” I said to my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones.

And, she didn’t say anything, and she didn’t even look at me, but she just threw her hand out and shook her finger at me, slowly and decisively.

. . .

(Right after that happened with the two shifts, the next time that I came on shift, my one [chubby] [Thai] coworker said hello to me and then was like, “I am glad that you decided to come to work today.”)

. . .

(I wonder if [South Asians from South Asia] are aware that their tipping behavior can serve as karma-like punishment for others, and perhaps not only for individuals, but for all heirs of the great Western imperial powers. The erstwhile-colonials are getting their revenge, you might say. If there was any justice or commonsense in the way this country was run, though, we would slap a like 18% automatic surcharge on H-1B visas, and spread that money around to all the waiters they’ve f*cked.)

A dynamic at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

Especially with a good number of (East Asian from East Asia) and (South Asian from South Asia) (student) customers, they walk in and don’t realize there’s a seating system, and a lot of them go to seat themselves.

(Sometimes I let them know that we seat people, since it usually doesn’t matter, but sometimes people sit at tables that we keep for large groups who come in; I say that to clue them in but let them save face.)

Sometimes, too, they don’t realize that there’s a system where we pick up their check at the table and run their credit cards or whatever, and they show up at the register bearing the little black plastic tray things that we put all that sh*t on, which you really don't do unless you have that scanny Apple Pay thing that a lot of the kids do nowadays.

(I wonder if all of this behavior correlates to bad tipping, since maybe they assume that the restaurant is more casual or cheaper than it is, perhaps because it’s “ethnic.”)

On (Guatemalan) music.

Like a couple months ago at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now, some of the (Guatemalan) kitchen workers were doing food prep while listening to some kind of tinny slower tempo music that was coming out of one of their phones.

“What is that?”, I was like, and one of them explained that it was ‘marimba’ music, which they then clarified was the name of the genre of music, though the music itself often contained the playing of the marimba instrument.

And, they said it was very Guatemalan.

Like the next day when I saw my one (Pentecostal) (Guatemalan) coworker, I asked him if he listened to marimba music.

“No,” he was like, and he then said that he only listened to praise music, like the psalms