An exchange with my one (Pentecostal) (Guatemalan) coworker…

 …at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, after he’s draining the deep-fryer and there’s this gigantic metal pot of extremely hot oil sitting out on the kitchen counter where we assemble takeout:

Him (in English, to practice, though he also has an important message to give me): “Be careful, it is hot.”

Me (running around doing something): “Okay.”

. . .

Me (a few minutes later, when things slow down, as I gesture to the gigantic metal pot of extremely hot oil and talk to him very slowly in English, to give him practice, as I also put on an ingenuous persona): “[His first name], what did you say? Do you want me to drink it?”

Him (looking me dead in the eye and very seriously, and also in English, to practice): “Yes, I said that I want you to drink it. I want you to drink it all.”

. . .

(Later, I rested my hand on the spot on the metal counter top where the gigantic metal pot of extremely hot oil was, and it surprised me, the metal there was still so hot that it almost burned my hand, though not quite, although the pot hadn't been resting there for quite a while.)

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

 …as I pass by the hallway that goes to the kitchen, and where the ice machine is that people set their meals on and eat while standing, occasionally:

[I see this one kind of rounded black thing kind of sticking out midway up the doorframe, and as I walk, my one (tall) (new) (Thai) coworker comes into view, and it’s basically her shapely ass, which is covered in her work-tights and is so big and round, that it sticks out a long ways and is a separately-sightable entity, if you approach her in certain contexts from the right angles, where it's the only thing you see from her body.]

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!"

(. . .)

Work faux pas with a very large group of (South Asian-American) (undergrad)-types…

…at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, who are getting their dessert of several plates of mango and sticky rice, and for whom I pre-bus a pot of chili flakes that they had been using for their entrees as I make the comment:

“Here let me get this, unless you want chili on your mango, Mexican-style!”

(Later as I do stuff with their separate checks, I hear them refer to someone as “Pedro,” at which point I notice that this one [fattish] [poorly-shaven] [brown] guy to who they’re talking is a slightly different type of [brown], and suddenly I’m like, “Oh fuck,” and then when I go check the names on their credit cards for all of their separate checks and it’s all ANANDRA PRAVOOBHAPATTI and sh*t like that, I do see one that’s different, and it’s something like PEDRO RODRIGUEZ, and then I realize, oh yes, there was a stealth [Mexican?] among them, when I made that comment.)

Addendum.

One day after we stopped doing puzzles at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, it was so slow, that I did some deep cleaning at the beginning of a shift.

And, I used a sponge with cleaning soap to get stains off the printer that we get takeout orders on, and I also wiped down the miso soup pot entirely, and changed out the plastic container where we keep the dried seaweed that we add into it.

And, when the next shift came on, I told my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones to look at that part of the work area, and tell me three things that were different.

And, she immediately started wondering if I hid things somewhere and she went to look behind the framed liquor license and whatnot that we have on this shelf right above there, and I told her no, just to look, but she couldn’t get it, and neither could my one (tall) (new) (Thai) coworker.

But, that part of the work area now looked so clean, that you couldn’t believe it!

I can't believe they missed it.

Puzzle drama (3 of 3): Aftermath.

A few days after that puzzle magazine crackdown, I come onto shift at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, and it’s slow, and my one (older) (Thai) coworker is doing some kind of mild squat-like exercises behind the counter.

“See,” I’m like, “No puzzles, so now we do aerobics.”

And, she didn’t exactly laugh, but she didn’t exactly disagree.

Otherwise, the shift was uneventful. It was Hanukkah, and a local townsperson had come in at 8am to use the deep fryer for latkes, and it was also mid-academic year graduation so we had a few large parties in (“Who’s the graduate, what’s the program?”, I said as I always do in such cases, in this instance to this one large [South Asian] family, and it was a young [plumpish] man with a bachelor’s in computer science, and when they said they were eating family-style, I told the [similar-looking] [plumpish] mother that he could write a program to figure out the optimal distribution of plates and bowls, to her general delight).

My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker observed to me that day, as well, that the reason I like doing research on the one ancient language that I’ve been researching intensively the past few years, is because it’s like a puzzle – and I said that she was right, and that she’s the second person to have observed it to me!

. . .

(Years ago my one assisted living client with [disabilities] had also said the same thing to me, that it scratched the same part of my brain and my personality as my doing crosswords and stuff like that, and I had never noticed that before, but I had to agree, automatically, since she was right. How observant, both of them.)

Puzzle drama (2 of 3): Crackdown.

One night when we were doing puzzles at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, the one (husband) owner came in, saw us crowded around the magazine on the back counter, and yelled something in (Thai) at my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones, and we quickly tucked the magazine away, and he said to wipe everything down, even though it already had been, and to check on customers, which we already had, though 2 of the 4 tables out there were waiting for food and the other 2 only *looked* like they needed help, since they had already paid up and had full waters and everything and were just lingering and talking after their meal and really didn’t need any attention at all, except for maybe occasional water.

And then, the next time I go into work, there on the counter is this long 22-point list, saying all the things that you should do each shift before you look at your phone (no mention of doing puzzles), all of it really, really basic sh*t, like “Make sure there’s enough small plates” and sh*t like that, which if we weren’t already doing, the restaurant couldn’t function at all.

And, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker is standing there – she had led me to it, to show me – and amid several flower-and-vine doodles that she had drawn around the edges, she points to the bottom, where she had added a 23^rd point, which said:

23. REPEAT.

She also told me that that afternoon her and our (new) (tall) (Thai) coworker were doing all of that listed stuff, only SLOOOOOOOWW, to fill the time, since sometimes it really is truly dead at the restaurant and there's nothing to do.

Later, when she had to go get something from the basement, too, I told her that she was only doing that, so she could go do puzzles there.

. . .

(Overall, I made a lot of jokes like that…  On the whole, though, as far as workplace drama goes, I’d vastly prefer this type of drama, to what I’ve seen in eldercare and universities.)