A story of my mother, about attempting to transfer over her driver's license to another state.

Like a month ago I had very weird days at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now because my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker and my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker had driver's tests and needed the day off for that -- what a good day to work a double, I observed, since it would keep me off the streets -- and, it turns, out I mentioned this over the phone to my mother, and she was like, "Did I ever tell you that story about my driver's license?".

She hadn't, and as she told it, years ago when she was living in a different state temporarily because of her job at that time -- I think this was the early 70s? -- she looked into transferring her driver's license, but you had to get re-tested, and she decided to go through with it, even though the rumor was was that they were super super tough there.

And, she flunked the test.

Then, as she gets home, what does she see on the passenger seat of her car, but the wallet of the driving instructor, it had fallen out onto the seat when he was sitting there during her exam, and neither he nor she had noticed it when he had gotten up and left the car after it was all over.

So, she called up the DMV right away about the wallet, and the guy got on the phone and mentioned that when she returned the wallet, she could retake the test.

"Like he would pass you?", I was like.

"Yes," she was like.

"So did he?", I was like.

"No," she said. "I thought, 'Screw you,' so I just returned the wallet and I didn't take the test and I just kept my [home state] driver's license and used that."

"What?!", I was like.

"He was going to pass me now?", my mom was like. "No, what nonsense, screw you."

. . .

(I really see myself in this story, in terms of where a lot of my character has come from. It's eerie.)

Two recent signs of decline in the European academy:

1) There was a recent round of severe cuts to Humanities majors at a long-renowned (European) university, including programs that not only intersect with the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for the past number of years, but also employ a number of specialists with whom I've personally interacted with, on stuff in their specializations that affects what I research.

2) A recent article crystallized something that I myself had come across -- that the Humanities in (a lot of Europe) are moving to a 3-to-5 year grant model, where there's a head researcher who starts an initiative and gets grants, takes up doctoral students to work on that specific project and write their dissertations off of it, and then lets them go afterwards... Only, it's not like every Humanities researcher has an endless number of big-scale projects like that that are amenable to that style of research design and staffing, so (as I think this article observed) it's a "boom or bust" / "feast or famine" situation for both the head researcher and any doctoral students, where you get this big project providing a few years of stability, but then you're let go as part of an identical-looking cohort who had been forced into someone else's vision, and it's not clear if you'll ever get anything like that again.

. . .

(In terms of a profession with this sort of skill-set that I have, I really was born at a bad a time -- it seems like I could just squeak through that profession in decline, but it declined too rapidly for that, and, moreover, other professions got more rigid and you couldn't cross over as easily...  Any little bit later, and the writing would have been on the wall and I simply wouldn't have entered, and I would have been able to locate an amenable sector where I could have advanced more easily... Still, though, it just kills you to see so many of these lug-nut baby boomers who have poorer training and worse teaching skills, and just have this stranglehold on these dwindling professions because of their lifetime jobs -- just appalling, and so sad, both for the younger generations, and for the creation of knowledge itself. No institution is perfect, but the less positions and the less chances for advancement that exists, the more that such glaring mediocrity comes into focus, especially since it's combined with rhetoric of "meritocracy" due to these people having tenure and their having supposedly been vetted as the best of the best.)

Several recent-ish (South Asian) customers...

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

1) A (late middle age) (very pleasant) (upscale) (South Asian from South Asia) woman took charge of ordering for her large family group of like five or six people and everything goes very smoothly, but then like fifteen minutes after her order, she calls me over to the table and says that instead of having the one dish be vegetable, please have it be tofu, because they don't have tofu in any dish that they ordered, and they should have one dish with tofu.

So, I'm like, "I'm sorry, ma'am, I can go check, but I think it's probably too late for that now because your dish is probably already cooking," and I offer the option of ordering a side of fried tofu if that's the case, to which she assents, and I go back and check, and their dish is one minute from coming out, and so I place the side-order of tofu, which is very unusual and which the (Thai) (husband) owner immediately notices when it prints out and so calls me over and asks what's up, and so I tell him it's "an Indian table" and they wanted to change a dish to tofu fifteen minutes after ordering when it was already coming out of the kitchen, and so they ordered that side dish instead, so they could have some tofu with their meal.

And, he didn't say much, and just went back to cooking.

2) A(n early 50s) (South Asian from South Asia) man had ordered like ten minutes earlier, and he suddenly shows up at the back counter and starts demanding no fish sauce, no oyster sauce, and he says he has an allergy and so to make sure no fish sauce, no oyster sauce, and so I'm like, "I'm sorry sir, I'll go back and check, but is this a dietary preference, or is this an allergy?", and he keeps saying allergy, but my sense is that it isn't, it's just him making that up in order to get what he wants when he wants, and I don't like that behavior one single bit, it's highly manipulative, and so I press him on the nature of the allergy, and he can't say, and even though he speaks (English) at an extremely high level, he just goes back to saying no fish sauce, no oyster sauce, he has an allergy, and by that point like two minutes have gone by, and then suddenly my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones shows up by my side and is like, "Done," and she tells the customer that she changed his order, and he goes back to his table.

. . .

Besides my standard spiel where I tell customers who try to retroactively change orders that it can interrupt the kitchen and cause mistakes in their orders and those of others, I also now make sure to tell them that we have multiple languages spoken in the kitchen, and it can be very difficult to go back and find out where the food is in the cooking process and change what's needed to be changed if it can even be changed, and to communicate that information verbally rather than in writing, instead it's much much better to have everything correct in writing on the initial ticket, and so mistakes happen and we will do our best, but please try to have the entire order information correct when the order is given at the table in the future, please.

A recent schtick with restaurant customers...

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

If there's two of them and they're sitting directly across the table from one another and they order one or two appetizers, I make sure to place the dishes exactly between them, so the food is clearly equidistant from each customer.

"There we go, right in the middle," I'm like. "That's so you don't fight."

Two bits:

1) It was striking this fall, how one day at the restaurant I noticed just a very few leaves blowing across the street, and then two days later I already had to start sweeping them out of the doorway every day, so many had started to come down and were always starting to blow inside.

2) Also very memorable this fall was a (shorter) (edgy-looking) (later middle-aged) (quiet-voiced) (South Asian) woman who comes in with a (designer-looking) purse and sits down, and demands order service quickly, and she wants her fish without green beans, and also she wants an order to go and we figure it out so it can be warm for her, and then at the end of the meal she suddenly wants to pick up her to-go order since she needs to catch a bus, and the meal isn't quite ready yet though thankfully it comes out two minutes later, and though the bill had been sitting on her table forever and we said we'd take it up for her, she then shows up at the back counter to pay with her credit card, and as it prints out and she signs, she doesn't leave a tip, she just signs at the bottom, and so I do the spiel and ask her if everything was okay with the food and the service, because the owner will see that and wonder if something is wrong, and so she picks up the pen again, and she puts it down on the receipt and across the entire receipt she draws --

X

-- and then she goes back to her table to pick up her takeout which she had left there, and she grabs it and goes out the door to leave.

"She's always like that, she never tips," says my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones.

But, everyone was astonished that, when challenged, she simply drew an X across the entire receipt.

They'd never seen that one, before.

Messed-up food rehabilitation.

So, my last big batch of home-fermented sauerkraut came out tasting fine but with a very unappealing mushy texture, which according to what I read online can happen if you don't put quite enough salt into it, although it's usually fine to eat, the bad sign with that is horrible taste or slimy texture.

Their suggestion was that you can always use sauerkraut like that for adding to soups, so I bought some potatoes and turnips, and I went and dumped the sauerkraut in a big pot and added more water, and then when that was boiling with some whole peppercorns in it, I remembered a sauerkraut-and-apples dish that I had once tried at a friend's house, and so I cut up some (poorer quality) gala apples that I had in the fridge alongside dicing one nice granny smith, and I put that in before I finally added in the cubed potatoes and turnips.

All in all, it turned out very, very fine.

In general, I need to learn how to cook more fall soups, like with squash and parsnips and pumpkin and stuff.

British humor.

The other week I was emailing my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair), and he made this comment in an email going off of something that I had said –

I heard an artist on the radio saying something similar: the best music is produced in the early years.

-- to which I replied --

But what about Mozart and Beethoven?

-- to which he replied --

I don’t know enough about their musical biographies to comment. they did produce music in a different time (way back when) so maybe things were different then.

-- to which I replied--

Are you saying the world is getting worse?

-- to which he replied--

not qualitatively but quantitatively, yes.

-- which I interpreted to be not so much a continuation of the conversation or an actual response, but rather an opportunistic joke, meaning that people are just as good or just as bad as they’ve always been, but there’s just more of them, now.

. . .

British humor can be so odd.