Sunrise, Sunset:

1) The other week a(n older) (short-coiffed) (dyed blonde hair) (white) (woman) behind me in line at the local hippie co-op was like, "Hey, don't you work at the Thai restaurant?", while like a week-and-a-half after that, a(n older) (white) couple who were in at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now said that they were surprised that I still worked there, since they'd seen me there a year-and-a-half ago when they first moved back to town, but they hadn't seen me since, so they had assumed that I wasn't working there any longer.

2) A few weeks ago when a (younger) (Mexican) couple was in at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now with a baby stroller and a young baby, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker observed that as regular customers we have seen them come in together when they were dating, and then when the woman was pregnant, and now they have a baby together.

"Ahhhhhhhhhh!", she was then like, with an agonized look on her face. "What am I doing with my life?"

Addendum addendum addendum.

Years ago, too, my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri) commented as someone who has known a fair number of people who have been employed in academia, that academia "seems like a lot of busywork" -- i.e., it's basically chock-full of time-consuming activities that don't really do anything and ultimately aren't all that productive.

And, she too works for a government bureaucracy, which seems at least to me fairly efficient.

One you start prying into academia and the logic of tenure, a lot of it is hierarchically-enforced and counterproductive practices that make no sense at all except for maintenance of tradition and image-needs of those in "the club."

On that note, my one art school colleague who wears (women's) clothes once also remarked that academic can be very confusing, since it's so rigid and hierarchical and stultifying and yet it's always saying that it's completely the opposite.

Addendum addendum.

Years ago my one (straight) (white) colleague who's into BDSM told me that his supervisor was discussing his dissertation project well after completion, and he said something about how it should have been done a whole different way, something along the lines of, "You know, we really should have done X, Y, and Z during data collection and analysis."

And, my colleague said he just sat there and thought to himself, "Ok, fine, maybe, but why didn't we have those conversations during the initial planning stages, instead of after years of work had been put in?". But, he bit his tongue, even as he just shook his head at how wacky it was.

He's worked in similarly-skilled jobs in the federal government (I think), too, and he said that you just don't see that blithe lack of common sense and lack of basic planning like you do in academia among the tenured.

Addendum.

Also, one of the stupidest f*cking things I've ever seen in my life is how in the Humanities, you write a dissertation, and then if you get into a tenure-track job, you spend years RE-WRITING THE SAME MATERIAL IN A DIFFERENT FORMAT, because you have to have a book as part of the job requirements.

Can you imagine that being a job-practice in any other half-sane field, where you spend years on a project and you've moved it through to completion on the level of findings, and then they're like, "Um, now we want you to say pretty much the same thing, but with different organization and style, and that's what you should be doing for the next several years," with them never really going back and revisiting the process and modifying *that*, so that on the one hand you can achieve whatever the desired final product is the first time around, and so that on the other you can then move on in turn onto something else instead of performing years on essentially what's an unneeded re-write.

It's just colossal mismanagement and sheer waste of time and energy, and it just makes the field look so extravagant and out-of-touch, and even strange.

The behavior of tenured professors is so much appallingly worse than people at large know, and inasmuch as it takes place at places that get public money, it's really unacceptable.

A vicarious insight into how academia is not like many other workplaces:

A (beatnik-like) (lower-class) (white dude) colleague who's tenured at a pretty major public university was pretty much asked to stop participating in so many creative theses, he said, since it's expected that everyone does like 3 every 4 years or so, and he did 30, probably because (I'm assuming) he finds it intellectually invigorating and even just plain fun to be around people with a creative bent.

Basically, he was making everyone else look bad, so they wanted him to stop doing what he likes and what he's good at, even though no-one else particularly wants to do that work.

End of the story is, he's tenured, so he respectfully pushed back and said he'd do how many he saw fit.

But, still, can you imagine that at any other normal workplace, stopping someone wbo's dedicated and who's good at their job from doing what they want to do?

Like, at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, many of us in the front-of-the-house have our specific roles that we gravitate towards (helping tables, manning the counter, packing food), and those different preferences and talents are recognized and valued, and no-one would imagine just trying to disrupt or hamstring any of that.

Yet another way that tenure's "lifetime jobs" actually hurt the mission of education and research when actually put into practice, much more than one might think at first.

A crack at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, after some (tattooed) (middle-aged) (white) customers say that after dinner they're headed to a famous local "battle of the bands"-type competition where local bands do cover sets of famous bands, and when I ask how they make sure that there's no repeats of who they're covering between bands, they say that that's taken care of at the registration level by the judges, and that they also forbid covering bands that people have been doing too much lately, and when I say like who, they say lately it's mainly been the Go-Go's:

"So" I was like," You're saying the Go-Go's a no-go?"

. . .

(The [tattooed] [middle-aged] [white] wife of the apparent couple among them seemed appreciative of that line, and not only smiled, but repeated it out loud once, after I said it.)

A running joke I began making at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, after my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker said that her right thigh hurt from her periodic birth control shot:

"Birth control is a scam," I'd be like. "I have sex all the time, and I never get pregnant."