Ribbing at work.

This summer at work at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (chubby) (Thai) worker had this like little tube of chapstick that she’d hold up to her nose and put her hand over and sniff it, and when I asked her and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones about that, it turned out to be something like a Vick’s Vaporrub smelling salts thing that they use in (Thailand) a lot, only you use it not to revive yourself, but to sniff it when it’s hot outside, and it makes you feel colder.

Like once or twice, too, then, I would point at her and be like, “She is always a problem at work, she is a major cocaine addict!”, which the two of them didn’t laugh at, exactly, but would nevertheless tolerate, and occasionally smile at.

Then, when the owners came back from vacation and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker used that thing again, I was like, “Hey, you can’t do cocaine now, the owners are back, they’ll see you!”.

And, she liked that joke a lot better.

A pleasant mistake at work.

A few months ago at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I was distracted and I saw a kitchen worker coming out of the kitchen to go get some soda from the front soda machine, so without thinking  I was like, “Hola,” only I turned around and it turned out to be not a (Guatemalan) coworker, but the one (older) (Thai) cook who works a lot of shifts.

And, right away in (Thai-accented) (Spanish) he was like, “Hola,” and then with a big smile on his face he was like, “Como estas,” and when I said good and asked the same of him, he was like, “Bien,” all the time with a big smile on his face.

And, I asked him if he knew (Spanish), and he said no, but just a few words.

Then, like a few days later the next time we were working together, as I was coming through the kitchen to come in and clock in, I was saying hello to everyone, and when I said hello to him, he just turned to me and with a big smile on his face was like, “Aloha.”

Messing with (Spaniards), or at least several attempts to do so.

So, when I was in the city that I used to live in this summer, my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri) asked me to come over on my last day in town to help her clean, since she was banking points for some online home exchange program and she needed to clean her apartment so some (Spaniards) could stay in it so she could accumulate more points as she temporarily moved out and went to go sleep on a friend’s couch for like a week.

So, I did, and we chit-chatted and put different stuff on Alexa, like folk music and Wagner and Phillip Glass – my choice, though several times, she was like, “Alexa, turn it down!” -- and eventually the (Spaniards) arrived there right before I left, and so I got to meet them all and their friends who lived nearby who were the reason they were coming into town, and who were meeting them so they could all go out and do something right that afternoon.

And, they were all very nice and very professional, and included some (chic) (50-something) couple and their like (30-something) son and their (quiet) (older) dad.

And, since they were all pretty monolingual, I got to practice my (Spanish) and mess with them a bit.

Like, my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri) has all this art on her condo wall, and a couple pictures almost look like (Asian) people in (triangular) hats kind of almost like a (Vietnamese) stereotype, so I said in my broken (Spanish) something about how if they don’t like the art because it’s not politically correct, they can [and at that point I went THPPPPPTT with my tongue, and motioned turning over those pictures], at which the one vivacious professional woman started doing the equivalent of like oh my my and saying something about how if her daughter was here, she wouldn’t like those paintings at all, and shaking her head.

Later, too, they were remarking at how the one yuppie garden across the street had a small pond with ducks, so when they were going to go step out to go look at them, I like was like, “No pueden comer las patas,” which I meant to mean “You cannot eat the ducks,” but I don’t think I used the proper plural form of the verb with them, and maybe not the right grammatical construction for forbidding something, but oh well, at least I tried.

. . .

(Later my one [lawyer] friend from [Missouri] told me that actual [Vietnamese] people made that art. She also said that since we had cleaned, she had put on some Phillip Glass to stretch to before she went jogging.)