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."