...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:
My new schtick for 2025 with all of my (Guatemalan) coworkers is that I go up to them and say, "Un ano nuevo, y yo soy el mismo loco" ("A new year, and I am the same crazy person").
. . .
(They all seemed mildly amused at that.)
I've noticed lately that (younger) customers of all types (Asian- and Caucasian-American, South Asian from Asia) do this thing where they have separate bills, and then someone decides to pay for someone else and takes the check of that person and slips it in behind their bill and their credit card on their black plastic tray, all without telling us, as if we're carefully looking for nestled receipts when we don't expect them, especially after we've just received instructions to subdivide the bill in a different fashion.
I wonder where this goes back to -- perhaps a TV show somewhere, where they've seen someone paying for someone else's bill like that?
Like, I've never seen it from (older) customers, and it spans both (American) and (non-American) (young) customers, so it must be coming from somewhere, and the only thing that I could think of that could link those groups would be mass media.
Back in the fall at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, like three (South Asian from South Asia) (like very late undergrad- or very early graduate student-age) students came in, two men and one women.
And, they were odd.
Like, I was up by the table and they just seemed off, and I asked my standard question about any appetizer orders being put in right away -- something that is very rarely taken up by any (South Asian) customer, in fact they tend to dislike the question (because it rushes them, or because it takes control out of their hands?) -- and as I go to step away, the woman starts saying something quietly while still staring at the menu, and it seems like she's talking to her friends, but as I step away, all of their heads turn to look at me, and so I step back and apologize and ask if she had said something and wanted to order, and yes, she wanted some vegetarian egg rolls.
(Oops.)
Anyhow, when they go to order, the one guy wants basil rice with egg only -- something not on the menu -- and so I have to bring his attention to the roughly equivalent menu item, and again he wants egg only (? - there's basil in there, and also an array of vegetables, and plus you have an option of tofu or a larger mixed vegetable mix, so are you just asking for like rice and basil, or what?) -- and so finally I have to point him to the menu and lead him through the listed ingredients, and then his (female) friend explains that you order either tofu or the vegetable mix, and so after those interventions he places something like a recognizable order.
Then, the next guy goes, and he says something that I just can't understand, because he says something about a curry and rice, but neither is a name that is in the menu or is easily recognizable as a name that's in the menu, and it's not clear if he's actually ordering a curry, or the rice that has curry in it, or what, and when I ask him, he just keep repeating the same impenetrable phrase over and over, and it's not even clear if he's looked at the menu or is referring to anything in it. So, it takes some time to straighten that out, and it turns out that he wants to order *both* a full curry and a full fried rice, and so I gather all of their orders, and just as I've finished entering them and am about to push the one final button to send the entire order back to the kitchen, he shows up at my side by the front terminal to cancel one of his orders that he just made two minutes ago, now he just wants the curry, no fried rice, and I ask him if he's changing anything else, he says no, that's the only change, and I say that I should check with the table, and he says no, it's the only change, but I firmly say no, everyone said that the order was final two minutes ago and now there's a change, so I would like to re-confirm with everyone, and so I go back to the table, re-confirm their order with them, and then I ask if it's truly final, and I give my spiel about mistakes can happen, but to change the order after it's placed tableside can cause cascades of errors and mess up their food, etc., and they do *not* seem too happy about that, that I've questioned their behavior and the changes they're making with their order.
Also, at the end of the meal, they say it's separate checks, and I ask if it's individual checks or if there's an internal group of someone with another, and they're like no, it's individual, and so I print out their checks and bring them to them, and suddenly, someone wants to pay for someone else.
Also, they're weirdly specific about what kind of boxes they want for their takeout, above what's normal, and all the while it's like I'm on tenterhooks, and they're just glaring at me, although **they're** the ones with the abnormal behavior.
. . .
(One of them also had a to-go order for takeaway after the meal, and it was $60 worth of food across 3 people, with. all things totaled, a $3 tip. It's always a bad sign when customers are hyper-demanding or don't look at the menu before ordering or try to change their orders, that so strongly correlates with boorish behavior and ultimately a bad tip.)
So, a few months ago at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, the one (older) (Guatemalan) guy who had left just shortly after I had started work there but then had recently come back, he started up this mildly maliciously machismo thing against me at work, for like a week or two.
Like, I always call everybody "Senor" ("Mister"), but he started calling me "Senora" ("Mrs.").
At first, I was like, "?Senora? No Senora," and to that he didn't say anything.
But, he kept it up, and so again I was like, "?Senora? No Senora," and then he said something about how it was to make me laugh, and it made me laugh and smile, so it served its purpose.
(Bullshit.)
So, the next time he did that, I started calling **him** "Senora," and he didn't seem to like that too much.
But, he kept it up, so then I started to be like, "Hola, Senorrrrrrrrrr...", and I would just roll my "r" forever, and keep him in suspense if I would add an "-a" at the end and call him "Senora" or not.
(Some of the other [younger] [Guatemalan] guys thought that this was hilarious, and they started rolling an extended "r" whenever they said the word "Senor" back at me, after they saw me doing that to him once.)
Finally, I thought of a good answer -- the next time that he called me "Senora," I would be like, "?!Senora...?! ?!Senora...?!? Con mi vergon?" ("Mrs. ... ?! Mrs. ... ? With my fat dick?") -- but, as it turns out, that was precisely the moment when he gave up his whole thing entirely, so I was never able to try out that response, boooooooooooooo.
...from the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:
1) When I was racking dirty glasses, I accidentally got distracted as I kept moving a glass, and it hit another glass and shattered that racked glass around the rim, so I went to go put it in a plastic bag and seal it up and then put that in the trash to be taken out at the end of the night (you never want to put the shards in there directly, since if they're not in another bag they can easily poke through the trashbag and hurt someone when they're taking the trash out; on that note, as an aside, you should **never** use a glass to scoop ice directly out of an ice bin, because if it chips or shatters, you have to clear out the entire bin and let all of the ice melt and then collect all of the little pieces from inside there and also from wherever you put all of the ice so that it can melt, and that's just a huge amount of time and a big pain in the *ss, it's just so much better to never be in that situation in the first place).
Anyhow, as I stood by the trash-bin behind the restaurant counter, with a plastic bag out and the mostly intact glass sitting there and I'm starting to unroll some masking tape, my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones looks at me and at what I'm doing and is like, "No, no, Scotch tape, people will see masking tape on the glass."
2) It's very interesting how my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones essentializes lack of tip-giving; so often, she doesn't want to discus customers and their behavior, but instead cuts the conversation short and is just like, "They're cheap," or, "That's them."
...about the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:
1) It's really something how much of the back-of-kitchen staff has flipped since I started working there like over two years ago, like one (older) (Guatemalan) worker who had left right after I got there came back and the one (Guatemalan) guy who we started the diablo joke with still works there sometimes for extra cash, but otherwise pretty much everyone is different...
It's like an article that I've read, that like half of a typical restaurant's staff flips over in the course of a year.
2) I guess we make the fishcakes with "ladyfish," which the one (Thai) (wife) owner with the tired face said is "chewy" and is used for fish cakes a lot in Asia, like in Thailand, Vietnam, and China.
And, I hadn't thought about it, but as soon as she said the word "chewy," it automatically struck me that that description was very right, because the fish that we use in the fishcakes **is** exceptionally chewy.
It's quite the odd texture for fried fish, but you don't necessarily think about it, unless someone points it out.
Towards the end of this summer, I had a very memorable shit.
Like, it all came out a bit loose, and then it was just like 2-3 anus-clenching squirts of liquid, and, done.
When I looked in the bowl, it was very dark, like a black, and the very last squirts had large seeds in them, making me remember the plate of raw tomatoes and cucumbers that I had sliced up into slices and sprinkled with salt the previous night, to eat as a cold-plate.
It was like everything went through my intestines and came out in the same order, and the fibrous vegetables and seeds came out last, as a blast of liquid.
It's almost like the black and odorous heap of shit in my toilet had archaeological layers, telling of time to any who looked.
