Three sets of problem customers…

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

1) A (long-haired) (earring-wearing) (undergraduate-age) (South Asian-American) princess who gets her entrée and immediately requests the menu and then sees that the item clearly lists mushrooms, and then sends it back since she didn’t realize it had mushrooms, and she doesn’t like mushrooms.

 2) A group of three (South Asian-from-South-Asia) (graduate student-age) people, two of whom order gigantic contraptions of soup that are usually for entire families, and the (female) of which leaves nothing on her bill, as my one (new) (Thai) coworker tells me, as she comes distraught back from doing something at their table.

“I saw the bill, she leaves nothing!”, she was like.

So, I told her that if she had a chance, to pretend to see the bill, and do the trick that the (husband) owner said, to say, “Oh no, was everything okay?! the owner will see this and get mad at me” etc. etc., which she did find a chance to do, and which embarrassed the woman into leaving two dollars (two).

3) A (scruffily-bearded) (balding) (somewhat cross-eyed) (earringed and beringed) (kind of homosexual) (STEM) (South Asian) (grad student-type) is in with a friend, and requests a fried rice, only the vegetables taken out and put on the side, which I take as an order without questioning, only it turns into this whole thing where the owner has to come out and ask him exactly what he wants, and then they talk, and then they do it, and it turns out to be this huge ordeal, since it seems like a simple modification, but it changes the whole cooking process and you have to cook the stuff separately on separate burners, and it clogs up the stove space for other orders and is like twice the amount of work for just one dish and it throws off the workflow for all the other orders coming in that need to go through that stove..

So, when I do serve it, I apologize to him, and I say we can’t do it in the future, since it seems like a simple modification, but it actually is tough for the kitchen to process, etc. etc., and so in the future, that that same order probably won’t be possible.

And, it doesn’t seem to register with him or bother him, though he nods.

And, later, I see him eating with his hands, where he picks up clumps of rice, and then bits of the vegetable, and puts it together into his mouth, with his fingers, just over and over and over.

 (Did he con us into making some shitty imitation of a regional dish for him, out of nostalgia for his homeland?)

Overall, too, with all the other sh*t he got, the bill is twenty-four dollars, and he leaves a two-dollar tip.

“Bad tipper,” my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker says as he leaves and I show her that, and it’s clear she knows him from before.

"If I had known that, I would have said no to his special order," I was like. "Always tell me!"

(. . .)