Two more restaurant tidbits...

...from the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) When I was racking dirty glasses, I accidentally got distracted as I kept moving a glass, and it hit another glass and shattered that racked glass around the rim, so I went to go put it in a plastic bag and seal it up and then put that in the trash to be taken out at the end of the night (you never want to put the shards in there directly, since if they're not in another bag they can easily poke through the trashbag and hurt someone when they're taking the trash out; on that note, as an aside, you should **never** use a glass to scoop ice directly out of an ice bin, because if it chips or shatters, you have to clear out the entire bin and let all of the ice melt and then collect all of the little pieces from inside there and also from wherever you put all of the ice so that it can melt, and that's just a huge amount of time and a big pain in the *ss, it's just so much better to never be in that situation in the first place).

Anyhow, as I stood by the trash-bin behind the restaurant counter, with a plastic bag out and the mostly intact glass sitting there and I'm starting to unroll some masking tape, my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones looks at me and at what I'm doing and is like, "No, no, Scotch tape, people will see masking tape on the glass."

2) It's very interesting how my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones essentializes lack of tip-giving; so often, she doesn't want to discus customers and their behavior, but instead cuts the conversation short and is just like, "They're cheap," or, "That's them."

Some restaurant observations...

...about the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) It's really something how much of the back-of-kitchen staff has flipped since I started working there like over two years ago, like one (older) (Guatemalan) worker who had left right after I got there came back and the one (Guatemalan) guy who we started the diablo joke with still works there sometimes for extra cash, but otherwise pretty much everyone is different...

It's like an article that I've read, that like half of a typical restaurant's staff flips over in the course of a year.

2) I guess we make the fishcakes with "ladyfish," which the one (Thai) (wife) owner with the tired face said is "chewy" and is used for fish cakes a lot in Asia, like in Thailand, Vietnam, and China.

And, I hadn't thought about it, but as soon as she said the word "chewy," it automatically struck me that that description was very right, because the fish that we use in the fishcakes **is** exceptionally chewy.

It's quite the odd texture for fried fish, but you don't necessarily think about it, unless someone points it out.

A story of a summer's shit.

Towards the end of this summer, I had a very memorable shit.

Like, it all came out a bit loose, and then it was just like 2-3 anus-clenching squirts of liquid, and, done.

When I looked in the bowl, it was very dark, like a black, and the very last squirts had large seeds in them, making me remember the plate of raw tomatoes and cucumbers that I had sliced up into slices and sprinkled with salt the previous night, to eat as a cold-plate.

It was like everything went through my intestines and came out in the same order, and the fibrous vegetables and seeds came out last, as a blast of liquid.

It's almost like the black and odorous heap of shit in my toilet had archaeological layers, telling of time to any who looked.

A story of my mother, about attempting to transfer over her driver's license to another state.

Like a month ago I had very weird days at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now because my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker and my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker had driver's tests and needed the day off for that -- what a good day to work a double, I observed, since it would keep me off the streets -- and, it turns, out I mentioned this over the phone to my mother, and she was like, "Did I ever tell you that story about my driver's license?".

She hadn't, and as she told it, years ago when she was living in a different state temporarily because of her job at that time -- I think this was the early 70s? -- she looked into transferring her driver's license, but you had to get re-tested, and she decided to go through with it, even though the rumor was was that they were super super tough there.

And, she flunked the test.

Then, as she gets home, what does she see on the passenger seat of her car, but the wallet of the driving instructor, it had fallen out onto the seat when he was sitting there during her exam, and neither he nor she had noticed it when he had gotten up and left the car after it was all over.

So, she called up the DMV right away about the wallet, and the guy got on the phone and mentioned that when she returned the wallet, she could retake the test.

"Like he would pass you?", I was like.

"Yes," she was like.

"So did he?", I was like.

"No," she said. "I thought, 'Screw you,' so I just returned the wallet and I didn't take the test and I just kept my [home state] driver's license and used that."

"What?!", I was like.

"He was going to pass me now?", my mom was like. "No, what nonsense, screw you."

. . .

(I really see myself in this story, in terms of where a lot of my character has come from. It's eerie.)

Two recent signs of decline in the European academy:

1) There was a recent round of severe cuts to Humanities majors at a long-renowned (European) university, including programs that not only intersect with the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for the past number of years, but also employ a number of specialists with whom I've personally interacted with, on stuff in their specializations that affects what I research.

2) A recent article crystallized something that I myself had come across -- that the Humanities in (a lot of Europe) are moving to a 3-to-5 year grant model, where there's a head researcher who starts an initiative and gets grants, takes up doctoral students to work on that specific project and write their dissertations off of it, and then lets them go afterwards... Only, it's not like every Humanities researcher has an endless number of big-scale projects like that that are amenable to that style of research design and staffing, so (as I think this article observed) it's a "boom or bust" / "feast or famine" situation for both the head researcher and any doctoral students, where you get this big project providing a few years of stability, but then you're let go as part of an identical-looking cohort who had been forced into someone else's vision, and it's not clear if you'll ever get anything like that again.

. . .

(In terms of a profession with this sort of skill-set that I have, I really was born at a bad a time -- it seems like I could just squeak through that profession in decline, but it declined too rapidly for that, and, moreover, other professions got more rigid and you couldn't cross over as easily...  Any little bit later, and the writing would have been on the wall and I simply wouldn't have entered, and I would have been able to locate an amenable sector where I could have advanced more easily... Still, though, it just kills you to see so many of these lug-nut baby boomers who have poorer training and worse teaching skills, and just have this stranglehold on these dwindling professions because of their lifetime jobs -- just appalling, and so sad, both for the younger generations, and for the creation of knowledge itself. No institution is perfect, but the less positions and the less chances for advancement that exists, the more that such glaring mediocrity comes into focus, especially since it's combined with rhetoric of "meritocracy" due to these people having tenure and their having supposedly been vetted as the best of the best.)

Several recent-ish (South Asian) customers...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) A (late middle age) (very pleasant) (upscale) (South Asian from South Asia) woman took charge of ordering for her large family group of like five or six people and everything goes very smoothly, but then like fifteen minutes after her order, she calls me over to the table and says that instead of having the one dish be vegetable, please have it be tofu, because they don't have tofu in any dish that they ordered, and they should have one dish with tofu.

So, I'm like, "I'm sorry, ma'am, I can go check, but I think it's probably too late for that now because your dish is probably already cooking," and I offer the option of ordering a side of fried tofu if that's the case, to which she assents, and I go back and check, and their dish is one minute from coming out, and so I place the side-order of tofu, which is very unusual and which the (Thai) (husband) owner immediately notices when it prints out and so calls me over and asks what's up, and so I tell him it's "an Indian table" and they wanted to change a dish to tofu fifteen minutes after ordering when it was already coming out of the kitchen, and so they ordered that side dish instead, so they could have some tofu with their meal.

And, he didn't say much, and just went back to cooking.

2) A(n early 50s) (South Asian from South Asia) man had ordered like ten minutes earlier, and he suddenly shows up at the back counter and starts demanding no fish sauce, no oyster sauce, and he says he has an allergy and so to make sure no fish sauce, no oyster sauce, and so I'm like, "I'm sorry sir, I'll go back and check, but is this a dietary preference, or is this an allergy?", and he keeps saying allergy, but my sense is that it isn't, it's just him making that up in order to get what he wants when he wants, and I don't like that behavior one single bit, it's highly manipulative, and so I press him on the nature of the allergy, and he can't say, and even though he speaks (English) at an extremely high level, he just goes back to saying no fish sauce, no oyster sauce, he has an allergy, and by that point like two minutes have gone by, and then suddenly my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones shows up by my side and is like, "Done," and she tells the customer that she changed his order, and he goes back to his table.

. . .

Besides my standard spiel where I tell customers who try to retroactively change orders that it can interrupt the kitchen and cause mistakes in their orders and those of others, I also now make sure to tell them that we have multiple languages spoken in the kitchen, and it can be very difficult to go back and find out where the food is in the cooking process and change what's needed to be changed if it can even be changed, and to communicate that information verbally rather than in writing, instead it's much much better to have everything correct in writing on the initial ticket, and so mistakes happen and we will do our best, but please try to have the entire order information correct when the order is given at the table in the future, please.

A recent schtick with restaurant customers...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

If there's two of them and they're sitting directly across the table from one another and they order one or two appetizers, I make sure to place the dishes exactly between them, so the food is clearly equidistant from each customer.

"There we go, right in the middle," I'm like. "That's so you don't fight."

Two bits:

1) It was striking this fall, how one day at the restaurant I noticed just a very few leaves blowing across the street, and then two days later I already had to start sweeping them out of the doorway every day, so many had started to come down and were always starting to blow inside.

2) Also very memorable this fall was a (shorter) (edgy-looking) (later middle-aged) (quiet-voiced) (South Asian) woman who comes in with a (designer-looking) purse and sits down, and demands order service quickly, and she wants her fish without green beans, and also she wants an order to go and we figure it out so it can be warm for her, and then at the end of the meal she suddenly wants to pick up her to-go order since she needs to catch a bus, and the meal isn't quite ready yet though thankfully it comes out two minutes later, and though the bill had been sitting on her table forever and we said we'd take it up for her, she then shows up at the back counter to pay with her credit card, and as it prints out and she signs, she doesn't leave a tip, she just signs at the bottom, and so I do the spiel and ask her if everything was okay with the food and the service, because the owner will see that and wonder if something is wrong, and so she picks up the pen again, and she puts it down on the receipt and across the entire receipt she draws --

X

-- and then she goes back to her table to pick up her takeout which she had left there, and she grabs it and goes out the door to leave.

"She's always like that, she never tips," says my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones.

But, everyone was astonished that, when challenged, she simply drew an X across the entire receipt.

They'd never seen that one, before.

Messed-up food rehabilitation.

So, my last big batch of home-fermented sauerkraut came out tasting fine but with a very unappealing mushy texture, which according to what I read online can happen if you don't put quite enough salt into it, although it's usually fine to eat, the bad sign with that is horrible taste or slimy texture.

Their suggestion was that you can always use sauerkraut like that for adding to soups, so I bought some potatoes and turnips, and I went and dumped the sauerkraut in a big pot and added more water, and then when that was boiling with some whole peppercorns in it, I remembered a sauerkraut-and-apples dish that I had once tried at a friend's house, and so I cut up some (poorer quality) gala apples that I had in the fridge alongside dicing one nice granny smith, and I put that in before I finally added in the cubed potatoes and turnips.

All in all, it turned out very, very fine.

In general, I need to learn how to cook more fall soups, like with squash and parsnips and pumpkin and stuff.

British humor.

The other week I was emailing my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair), and he made this comment in an email going off of something that I had said –

I heard an artist on the radio saying something similar: the best music is produced in the early years.

-- to which I replied --

But what about Mozart and Beethoven?

-- to which he replied --

I don’t know enough about their musical biographies to comment. they did produce music in a different time (way back when) so maybe things were different then.

-- to which I replied--

Are you saying the world is getting worse?

-- to which he replied--

not qualitatively but quantitatively, yes.

-- which I interpreted to be not so much a continuation of the conversation or an actual response, but rather an opportunistic joke, meaning that people are just as good or just as bad as they’ve always been, but there’s just more of them, now.

. . .

British humor can be so odd.

Addendum.

That same afternoon on the Sunday lunch shift at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker says that the cook made a special spicy fish salad and there's some for me, too, and I say I'm not sure if I'll like it and what do I do if I don't like it, and she says try some, and she'll have the rest if I don't like it, and it's sitting out on the kitchen service counter in a dish with a plate on top of it, and there'll be two of them there, and one is for her and the other is for me.

So, I go and I find it and I try it, and it's absolutely fantastic.

It's cut-up onions and green onions and a few cherry tomatoes and cilantro, and this fish thing that's the texture and consistency of a Vietnamese pork meatball, that she says is called "fish-line" and is made up of super-finely ground fish that's shaped into like a log and breaded and then cooked somehow and sliced up, and anyhow it's that in the salad, with a light spicy dressing like with soy sauce or fish sauce in it or whatever, just all of that put together, and chilled.

And, the fish is super-light, and she's not sure what kind it is, but in those little like cutlet pieces, almost, it almost takes like chicken.

Just superb off-menu (Thai) food -- yet another perk of working where I do.

She says when she asked our one (newer) (older) (female) (Chinese-Thai) coworker, she said the name as something in (Chinese) and so she can't remember what that name is, but that she would call it Yum Pla Sen ("fish-line salad," or perhaps, better, "fish-log salad").

Day - Evening - Day...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, like a month ago:

1) I come in to open up the restaurant for a Saturday lunch shift, and the door of the back alley is closed and locked, the first time that that's ever happened to me.

So, I knock, and after like ten secconds, it swings open, and it's my one (Guatemalan) coworker who we started the diablo joke about, and I can see the kitchen full of people behind him, getting food ready for the day.

"What?", I was like, "You don't want me to come inside?".

"No," he was like.

2) At the beginning of that dinner shift, there's **two** separate app delivery drivers up by our back counter waiting for their orders to come out, and **both** are loudly talking on speakerphone while they wait.

3) The next morning on the Sunday lunch shift, this (shorter) (tattooed) (white) woman and her (taller) (schlubby) (white) guy (boyfriend?) come in and order over a $100 of food to go, tipping nicely, too, and they also get some beers to drink while they wait -- "I'll have what he's having," she says -- and in the middle of all of this, the guy just stops and looks at me for some reason, and then he's like, "Well, you've been here a while."

Later, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker for some reason has two soft-boiled eggs sitting in a bowl with a plate on top, on top of the ice machine where we eat, and every time you walk by, you're looking them at eye-level, and they look like a pair of testicles.

So, I tell her that, and I tell that I support feminism, but not like that, and she just glares at me in a good-hearted way and says something in (Thai), and when I ask her what it means, she says it's, "[my first name], you're no good."

A local homeless person from this fall...

...who came into the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, several times:

A (young) (pretty tall) (very skinny) (very dark-skinned black) guy with (dreads) and a (well-trimmed beard), who once came into the foyer and stood there looking at the rotating electronic menu board that's to your right immediately when you enter, and who spoke softly and almost inaudibly when we asked him if he needed any help, and he just said he needed to stand there a minute, and he was there staring at the wall for like 5-6 minutes before he finally turned back and went out the door and left, and who another time at late afternoon on a weekend came in with some big cardboard box and a white plastic bag, and put the box on a table just inside the entrance, and pulled some food out of the bag and sat there and ate the food that he brought in for a bit, until he finally got up and left.

(. . .)

A reflection on paths not taken:

Looking back, if I had pursued a union job (i.e. a job at a parent union), I might have been miserable...

All the locals where I had connections went "woke" and started trying to tie Palestine shit into everything, which would have been very miserable for me, to try to mouth those lines and force that line onto state and local politics and onto contract battles.

I mean, with every job you have to do that to some degree, but that's just a high degree of nonsense to be repeating for the sake of a job, especially when you really don't believe in the approach and it would just be making you miserable the entire time.

Who knows, maybe I would have ended up shifting places and getting into something a little more progressive and a little more commonsense like at some of the building trades, but that's not where I had my connections, and who knows if a lateral shift like that would have actually panned out, if I was still in that world.

So many leftist issues are to polarize and get people hyped, and it's funny to be on the other side of that, where it's like, "I agree with you to a point, but nah..." They really make you not fit in -- they're the ones doing it! -- and it's all on them, it's all coming from them where they suddenly want you to toe this shifting line 100%, and if you're 85% but not all there with them on anything, suddenly you're the problem.

Who needs that in their life.

Life with a coworker...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) While me and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker are by the plating station where food gathers to take out to customers, my one (tall) (skinny) (Latino-American) (just-graduated-from-high-school) coworker grabs a tofu pad thai and finishes dressing it with raw carrots and beansprouts and a lime wedge and goes to hand it to me to take out, and then he suddenly stops and starts laughing at himself.

"Look what I did!", he's like.

As it turns out, the plate had already been dressed, but the side with all that stuff had somehow gotten turned away from where we all were, so him dressing the plate was actually the second time that that had happened, and there was a portion of raw carrots and bean sprouts and a lime wedge on each side of the plate.

(We took off the second lime wedge to return it to the lime-bin, since you could sanitarily salvage that, but otherwise we sent all that extra stuff out to the customer.)

2) When I ask my one (tall) (skinny) (Latino-American) (just-graduated-from-high-school) coworker what he thinks of the health insurance CEO assassination, he just gets this big wide dopey-looking smile on his face like it's Christmas, and it's a busy night and right then we get interrupted, and like twice more in the night I start asking him about it, and each time he just gets that big wide dopey-looking smile on his face.

. . .

(! - and he had been viscerally disturbed by the idea that people could come inside the restaurant and steal take-out orders.)

Addendum.

I've noticed every once in a while that some (South Asian from South Asia) customers round up the bill to the nearest dollar, whether it's a $17+ bill or a $53+ one, leaving less than a dollar in change for all of the service.

I wonder, where are they getting this from?

Is this from their own country, or is it from another country they've been in, or is this something they've come up with on their own?

The last seems improbable, since multiple people have done it -- that is, unless they all arrived at the same solution where they "tip" at minimum cost to themselves.

Sometimes, if it's a table with that kind of vibe and I don't recognize them -- you want to know how they tip if they're repeat, since you deprioritize them if they don't tip! -- I just don't even look at the bill.

Like, I just don't want to know.

Some recent restaurant customers...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) There's three (late 20s/early 30s) (South Asian) women who I get samples of a wine for so they can try it, with one ultimately getting a glass, and who order their fried rice and curry with the larger mixed vegetable mix, and who want more rice and more sauce and less vegetables in each, since that's the way they prefer it, and please ask the kitchen to make it that way for them, and maybe there's something else at the table that happens that they want, I forget, and anyhow, I'm going to clear plates from the table while they're still sitting there and the receipt has $0.00 tip, and so I do the thing that the (Thai) (husband) owner suggested and I act surprised and I'm all like, "Oh! Was everything okay with the food and the service, because we got you the samples like you wanted and we tried to do the food like you wanted!", and when they said yes, I point to the tip and say the line, that the owner would see this at the end of the night and would want to know what was wrong with the food and the service, and they all begin looking me in the eye and laughing delightedly (nervously?), sometimes casting a glance back and forth to each other, and then one takes a pen and goes to revisit the receipt, and they all start bending over it, and I go away, and when I come back later to fetch it, the tip is now $5.00 (more than 10% but not quite 15%, but as my one [chubby] [Thai} coworker would say, "Not bad for Indian").

And, I guess my coworkers all saw that, because after the receipt gets filed, they're all like, "Good job, good job!"

2) Like the very next shift when I'm working, when a(n undergraduate-age) (South Asian from South Asia) guy on a (date?) comes up to the register to pay with ApplePay and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones takes care of him, he leaves a $0.00 tip, and she tries doing the spiel like I did.

And, on the $22.74 bill, he leaves a $0.26 tip, to round it up to $23.00.

3) During a very very busy Friday night dinner shift, this table of three (young) (white) (blonde) co-eds comes in as part of a rush of like five tables all at once where they also all keep sitting on the menus and no-one at any of the tables is ordering although we stop by each of them several times to see if they're ready yet, and finally all of the tables all order at once and there's a log-jam in the kitchen, and then this one (blonde) (short-shorts-wearing) co-ed sitting by the wall asks us if we can check where their food is, and so I say it's a busy night and also people weren't putting orders in and then all the orders came in at once, so I could guarantee that their food was in the roster and was going to be coming out as quickly as possible, and then it finally does come out, and a few minutes after I stop by their table and ask how their food is, and it's good, but then that (blonde) (short-shorts-wearing) co-ed is like, "Where are the vegetables in my pad thai?", and I tell her that we wait tables as a team and I didn't place their order but I can check on it, and I go and look in the system, and it's a simple chicken pad thai order, there's no mention of any additional larger mixed vegetable mix, and so I scurry back and tell her that it wasn't entered in that way and we can do two things, she can take it as-is or we can bring out the portion of vegetables for her, which costs the extra two dollars that it costs, and she's like, "I come in here a lot, and I've never been charged for the vegetables before," which sounds strange to me since that's not true and also that's a really weird thing to have happen with the pad thai, and so I'm like, "The vegetables cost two dollars, ma'am, would you like the vegetables for your pad thai, or would you like the pad thai as it is?", and she starts saying something about how she's never had to pay for it before, and I say that maybe she's thinking of another restaurant where she gets pad thai, and then she says something about how another table got served before them, and then I say that I don't know what has happened in the past, but in the future if she comes in to order pad thai, she should specify both chicken and mixed vegetables at the time of ordering, and to do that costs two extra dollars, and I'd go get the person who took their order, and my one (tall) (thin) (Chinese from China) coworker who took their order says he doesn't care, just get her the vegetables, and I say it's weird, she's trying to pull something over on us, since that's not a mistake that would happen in the past where suddenly there's just the mixed vegetables in the pad thai and it doesn't cost anything, and also I don't recognize her and neither does anyone else, and plus she changed subjects to how they weren't getting their food on time -- "It's busy, no-one is getting their food," observes at that point my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones -- and anyhow I don't like the vibe from the co-ed, I get the sense that she's on the sociopath spectrum and she's pushing boundaries to get the better of us through lies and sheer force of will, and anyhow I don't like any of this one bit at all, like, not at all.

And, my one (tall) (thin) (Chinese from China) coworker says he doesn't care, and he gets the vegetables, and suddenly the (blonde) (short-shorts-wearing) co-ed seems happy, like a switch switched off in her and her personality is bubbly again, she came out on top, hahahahaha, dumb restaurant people, she got the better of them.

"That's weird," the (Thai) (wife) restaurant owner said a bit later, when she overheard us discussing that customer's behavior.

"Yeah," I was like, "And I think she went into the bathroom, too. I'd go check if she stripped the copper from the fixtures."