Telling myself enough is enough.

Like, this year it was my goal to up my weekly writing hours from four to six hours a week, and overall I’ve been managing even though occasionally it’s been tough, but then the other week I was only three days into the week and I’d gotten all 6 hours in, including .5 hours earlier that day and then like 3 hours later in the afternoon and early evening, and I was getting tired but feeling like I should do more that day and then the rest of the week, and I had to stop myself, and say enough was enough.

It's like my weekly project reading hours, too; I’ve been reading a bit broadly since for a long while now I’ve been telling myself that the goal is to have fun, and also I’m averse to directly reading more stuff that will create more writing projects and add to my backlog of writing, but even then, I sometimes feel like I should be reading more useful stuff.

And, by any accounts, this is all despite my being insanely productive.

A new running joke at work, in (Spanish).

So, there’s a new (Guatemalan) dishwasher at work whose name is Domingo (“Sunday”), so for a while now I’ve been mixing that fact into jokes with my one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker and then him, as I give my standard day-of-the-week greetings like “Feliz lunes” (“Happy Monday”).

Like, I’ll come in and be like, “Feliz lunes, [her name]” (“Happy Monday, [her name]”) and then like, “Feliz lunes, Domingo” (“Happy Monday, Sunday”), and it will make both of them chuckle.

One Sunday when we were all working, too, I was like, “Feliz domingo, Domingo” (“Happy Sunday, Sunday”), which was comic gold.

Then, after that, on another Sunday, I wished him a “Feliz tu dia” (“Happy Your Day”), then immediately afterwards in his presence I wished her a “Feliz su dia” (Happy His Day”).

Another time, too, I think I tried something like “Happy Day of Our Coworker,” but it was less successful, and stuff like “Feliz sabado, Senor Manana” (“Happy Saturday, Mr. Tomorrow”) was only a hair better.

After a while I began to run out of variations, but finally I came up with a decent one, where on a Saturday I was like, ‘Sabado con Domingo, hoy tenemos todo el fin de semana aqui” (“Saturday with Sunday, today we have all of the weekend here”), which they appreciated, though not after I repeated it several times, like I often do with many of my jokes.

Work disaster.

A few months ago at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I was taking an order in the restaurant, and all of a sudden from the back behind the work counter, there was just this sound of all these glasses breaking, which is something that absolutely never happens, like it’s incredibly incredibly rare that even a single dish gets broken, let alone a couple let alone a ton.

So, after I work through it and finish taking my order, I head back, and it turns out that my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was unloading washed glasses from the little stand where the dishwasher puts the washed rack of glasses, and as she had gotten a lot of it unloaded, it tipped over and the rest that were in it went everywhere and shattered, and so she said he must have put it off-center on the little stand, and her unloading it must have shifted the weight until it finally tipped and fell over onto the floor.

“Or maybe the house spirit is mad at you,” I was like, referring to the little shrine we have in a back corner at the restaurant, that’s like this bright-red picture-frame thing with what looks like (Chinese) characters on it, and that always has in front of it a glass of water and something that doesn’t look like incense but nevertheless leaves small heaps of (gray) (incense-like) ashes all over the (black) (back-corner) (linoleum) countertop.

“That’s what I said!”, said my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones, as soon as I said that about the house spirit being mad.

Like a few days after that, too, I was unracking glasses when my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker walked by, so I held the glass that I was unracking close to my chest, and I started petting it and being like, “Don’t worry, the mean lady won’t hurt you, don’t worry…”, and when she asked me what I was doing, I told her that all the glasses were scared of her now, so I had to tell them that she’s actually nice, and not to be afraid of her.

Self-assurance of a coworker.

Like almost a month or so ago at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I was mentioning something I’d written to my (tall) (skinny) (Latino-American) coworker who recently graduated from high school, and when I couldn’t find his contact on the messaging app that we use for work, he said just to text him the link, and he gave me his number.

And, I entered him as an alliteration in my phone contacts -

[shorter nickname version of his standard Latino name] + [first part of the restaurant’s name, which begins with the same letter as his nickname]

- and, when I showed him that, he was like, “Hell yeah,” but not in a mocking way, but in a real way, like he was stoked that someone had their phone contact of him named like that.

Like a few weeks after that, him and his (cool) girlfriend came in to place a takeout order, and it turns out that they were going to a punk show a few storefronts down, and that they were going to go back to the concert and then walk back and pick up their order in a bit.

And, I really wanted the restaurant to slow down enough so I could take time and walk over to the storefront punk show and deliver their order to them, but just when it was getting slow enough to where I could do that, they both walked in the door to come and pick up their order.

So, I told him what I had wanted to do, and he was like, “That would have been so cool,” but not in a mocking way, but in a real way, like he thought that that would have been the coolest thing in the world, to be “in” at the restaurant to the point where someone would walk over your delivery order for you, for free.

He seems very self-assured in the world, and living his life in a rather small town in the coolest way possible, and somehow he’s making it work.

A notable habit of some (South Asian) customers...

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

They make a decision, set everything in motion, then change their minds a little while later and come tell you to do something different than what they originally told you, expecting everything to change at the drop of a hat, no matter how much trouble and extra work it causes...

This has happened any number of times, and then it's happened again a couple more times these past few weeks.

Like, during the graduation rush madness, a (South Asian-accented) woman calls over the phone and says that she placed her order through a third-party delivery app (an entirely separate payment system!), and she says that she now wants two pad kee maos, a second one exactly like the one on her order, can we add an extra one to her order and charge her for that.

And, I locate her receipt and I had to be like, that's tough because it's not done through us, it's done through a vendor and involves a separate layer of computer systems with orders and payments, and then on top of that we are in the middle of the graduation weekend rush and I don't know where her order is in the massive queue of orders and if they've already started it, and to interrupt the cooks now could cause all sorts of difficulties with other orders since we're interrupting the very organized system we have and they're multitasking in the middle of multiple, multiple orders involving many other customers at a very high-volume time, so.... no, and then I add that that request would be tough even during a normal period of time, but now it simply is not possible.

(Often, I find myself acting like a teacher and explaining how restaurants work to [South Asians], to show the logic behind why their demands are difficult or not possible.)

"Okay, I understand," she was like, a bit nonplussed, and then there was just some silence that hung in the air over the phone-wires, and then that was that.

(Honestly, have these people ever been told "no" in their lives before?)

A few weeks after that, too, a big table of (younger-skewed) (wholly vegetarian) (South Asians) came in very late at night in the last hour that we were open and they had to wait for others and they dawdled on orders a bit even though we had told them it was starting to get late, and then they ended up ordering ahead before the others arrived but not as quick as they could have as they waited to start deciding and even then they haggled and rehaggled small details among the 4 who had arrived as I was standing there taking what they said was their final order, and ultimately they kept us open for like 20 minutes after kitchen-close when usually we can take off, but, when it came time for bills, they said separate checks for all 8, and then I asked if there were any internal groupings among the separate dishes like multiple people being on one bill, and two said yes so I confirmed that I'd group their items and then issue individual bills for the rest, and everyone in the group said yes, so I did that and created 7 separate bills, but later when we were all trying to clear their plates and run their credit cards and whatnot I get to the end of running the credit cards my coworkers had brought from the table, and somehow one credit card is missing because one of the bills isn't paid for, and I go to the table, and you know what I find out?

Two had decided that after all, they wanted to pay together, and they had slipped the bills together on the little black plastic tray, and since the receipts for the previously-separate bills were right on top of each other, I didn't notice what was happening, and I just ran the credit card for the receipt that was on top and that was hiding the other one that they now also wanted on that same credit card!

"Oh," I was like. "I can re-do this and cancel the credit card charge and combine the bills and re-pay, but I am confused. I asked once how everyone wanted to pay, and I confirmed that only two people were paying together, but now two more people want to pay together. Now, we have to cancel out the charge and combine the bills again, and this is extra work."

And, the (young) (bearded) (bespectacled) (mildly dark) (South Asian) guy started saying something something something, and I just responded firmly and began firmly talking over him a little and I was like, "I am confused, because I received different information earlier about how everyone wanted to pay, I had confirmed with everyone that I had received the correct information about how everyone wanted to pay, and now I am hearing something different."

Then, I turned around and went to go do the extra work, and later when I returned the bill with the re-done charge to that one guy he said "Thank you" a little uncertainly, but I pretended not to hear him as I turned to go do something else, to leave him wondering.

(Honestly, it's like you have to establish firm boundaries and show them what customer behavior is or is not appropriate, though I do have to wonder what happens when they go to other restaurants, do the servers there just let these people walk all over them?)

(Also, these people had a small baby out in a high chair and it got past ten o'clock at night and that baby was still out and awake, and the one woman at the table ended up [slowly] scraping the two last dishes into to-go boxes, first the one and then the other, though her husband who was sitting right next to her could have done one too and helped her, his arms didn't seem broken.)

A gentle correction in (Spanish) that happened the other day...

...from my one (young) (skinny) (Guatemalan) coworker with the (silver) front teeth:

Him (to me, after me talking about a takeout order like I always do): "Senor, por aqui" 

[I look confused]

Him (again): "Senor, por aqui, no para aqui"

. . .

(I could swear that the phrasing is para aqui, but maybe I've been f*cking that up for years, and it's just that no-one ever told me.)

More interest in my work:

My personal webpage recently got a Google hit from the 4th major European capital.

I can only assume it's because of me publicizing my recent findings on the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for the past several years.

How weird it must be for faculty, to have some guy come out of nowhere and (in many respects) do their own job better than them.