Customers in crisis:

1) At a(n already-weird) table of three (older) (white) customers, one (woman) begins to choke a little on too big a bite of food, and another (woman) springs up and puts her arms around her, and she starts yelling at me to come do the Heimlich maneuver, as she starts to try to do something like it.

“I don’t know how to do that!”, I’m like, “I haven’t been trained!”

And, after her friend recovers naturally, I don’t say anything, but it’s clear that the woman is embarrassed, since she herself attempted to try to do the Heimlich maneuver, without really knowing anything at all about how you actually do it, beyond some vague sense of where you stand and that you maybe do something with sharp hugs to the body.

So, although I had avoided mentioning anything at all about that situation when I was helping their table from that point forward, towards the end of the meal, she specifically raises that, and she says that the restaurant should always have one person on staff at all times who knows the Heimlich maneuver.

(Bitch.)

“I’ll tell the owners that,” I was like.

(Yeah, with restaurant staff turnover and everything, give that one a whirl. And also, thanks for displacing your bullshit onto me.)

 . . .

2) Two (white) women – a mom and a daughter? – both are done up and take great care about their mildly tawdry flesh-showing clothes, but both obviously have this slack unhealthy-looking skin and this dull, brittle-looking hair.

And, they order a tremendous amount of food for the two of them, like two egg rolls each and a pad thai, but they don’t want any to-go boxes, and on their plates, it’s like all of the noodles are there and the egg rolls are broken in half and maybe a piece or two unrolled a bit with a fork so that the insides of sliced cabbage and carrot are showing, and all together it’s like re-mounded small hills of noodles with egg roll halves dotting them here and there, where all in all it looks like they were very busy eating but you actually can’t tell how much they ate, although if you do look close, it’s clear that they ate almost nothing at all from the entire order, each of them.

Such disordered eating, and the mom taught the daughter.

. . . 

(I wonder if there was abuse in the family.)

. . .