Three restaurant happenings over two days...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, like over a month ago:

1) The temp is very cold outside and I wipe the front door glass for smudges from the inside and then go outside to do the same thing, only I can't wipe off the Windex on the outside, it's like smearing, and suddenly I realize that it's so cold, that the Windex is freezing in small misted sheets onto the glass.

(I then go back inside and get a wholly fresh paper towel to make sure that it was not some residual moisture in the used paper towel that we keep upfront and use and reuse until it's tattered away, to wipe small smudges off the glass whenever we realize that that's happened, and what do you know, the same thing happens with the new paper towel, too, it is indeed so cold that the Windex is freezing on the glass if you try to clean the front-door glass from the outside.)

2) After a particularly busy Sunday lunch rush with many individual checks -- 21 across three big groups, of 11 and 5 and 5! -- and many low and bad tippers who are mostly (foreign), the entire restaurant is like decimated after suddenly everyone ups and leaves, and there's like a table here and a table there and everything else is vacant but dirty and we just manage to to clear one single table when a (white) mom and her (teenage) (white) daughter come in and we sit them down at that one clear table, and I immediately apologize for how wrecked the restaurant is looking since every other table in the entire restaurant is full of dirty dishes, apart from the like two other tables where parties are still present, and I say that we just happened to have a big lunch rush and everyone all left at once, too, and we hadn't had a chance to clean anything up, so, sorry, we do apologize for the mess.

"Don't worry, it's okay," she was like. "It looks like my house. In fact, it makes me feel at home."

3) When my one (newer) (tall) (young) (Chinese from China) coworker is talking about how the H-mart in town had a delayed opening after a number of years, and he thinks it took five years to open, he turns and asks me in front of all of my other coworkers if it was five years like he thought it was.

"At least that," I was like. "Originally they were going to call it A-mart, and then it got delayed a year, so they called it B-mart, and then it got delayed another year, so they called it C-mart, and what is it now, H-mart? Yeah, so it must have been at least five years, probably more."

(I feel like my making family-friendly jokes at  table-side with customers is influencing my everyday behavior more and more -- I'm like becoming this purveyor of "gee wilkers" cornpone comedy that people of all ages can laugh at, though they often choose not to.)

Local jigsaw puzzle donation notoriety.

Like a month or so ago after Christmas I went to the local church-run charity resale shop to donate some unwanted presents and to re-donate some stop-gap scarves that I had bought from them when I couldn't find mine for the winter, originally, when I was taking out my winter clothes for the year, and also to give them some high-quality jigsaw puzzles that I had kept for them, that they could presumably sell quickly and make some money off of, since I save the better ones with all the pieces there for them, instead of putting them at the local public library's "take one, leave one" honor-system jigsaw puzzle exchange table in their foyer, there, since I leave just any old jigsaw puzzle there, since anything will do, there, but the resale shop would benefit from having the better kind of jigsaw puzzle.

And, "Are all the pieces there?", the (old) (white) lady at the counter-desk at the resale shop asked me.

And, I told her that they were, and I showed her how I had carefully masking-taped a small slip of paper so it stuck out of the edge of each box, and how it said for whoever was looking that all the pieces were there as of such-and-such a date.

"Thank you," that lady said, and then, another (old) (white) lady who was standing by there looked closely at me and then was like, "So you're the one who does that."

She then said that that is helpful, and that one of their workers used to count the pieces before selling each puzzle, but that takes so much time, that that just doesn't make much sense.

She also said that she gets some of the puzzles there for her family, and that her little grandson likes them and does them with his family, and she always takes out the pieces for him and lines them up, and one day he was like, "Mama is good at puzzles and Papa is good at puzzles but you're not good at puzzles, Grandma," since she would do that for him but she would never actually work at the actual puzzles like her daughter and her son-in-law would do, so you know what she told him, she told him, "Why, who do you think gathers the pieces for you," and that's what she told her little grandson, since he didn't think that she was any good at doing jigsaw puzzles.

Security incident.

On my last trip back from the city that I used to live in, they had just started to board the train and the line was moving forward, when people in uniforms pulled me aside and said that I had been randomly selected for a security check and took out a small stiff strip of paper and wiped it on my backpack and put it in some machine, and then they had me wait there as the one guy with the machine looked at the reading and perked up and then started excitedly showing it to everyone else, before they told me that I would have to wait there some more, and they began to radio for a dog, only to wait a few minutes and radio for the dog again, since it was at the far other end of the station and it wasn't coming, and they needed the dog there to check something out.

"I'm really sorry," I was like, "But will they hold the train for me?"

And, I explained to them that the last train of the night had been cancelled and I had already moved to this one, and there was no other way I could get home that night, and I was scheduled for work the next morning.

"We'll see," the one said, and the conductor was there, and I kind of looked to him, and he looked sympathetic, and I mentioned that I hoped that I could still get a seat facing forward, since I get carsick easily and it's hard on me if I have one of those train seats facing backward for the entire ride home.

And, the one security guy started asking me if I had cosmetics in there, and I said that yes, I did, I had some face cleanser and face cream in my toiletries, and they said that that was probably what it was, there's chemical overlap with military-grade explosives, and they showed me their machine and the readout said something about detecting military-grade explosives, and then they asked me for permission to search my bag, so I gave it to them, and they looked through it, and everything was fine, and then they asked me for my ticket and a form of identification like a driver's license, which I gave to them, specifying that the ticket printout was for the later cancelled train but the QR code for the conductor would link to the rescheduled ticket for the current train, and they wrote all of that information down with great care, and then they set me off to board the train with only five minutes until it left, and I was good.

And, the next day at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I told my coworkers the story, about how my skincare routine cosmetics made the train station police think that I was a terrorist.

"See how good my skincare routine is," I was like. "It makes me a sex bomb!"

And, they all kind of rolled their eyes at that, and I mentioned something again about me being a sex bomb, it's official, they even have a test for that, and the police test said that I'm dangerous, I'm a sex bomb, that's how good my new skincare routine is.

On buckwheat.

Last month at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I asked the (wife) owner with the tired face if I could buy like 6-8 small mushrooms off them for a one-time recipe that I was making -- I just don't cook with mushrooms, I said, and she said yes, I could buy them for two dollars, as she also said that if I ever bought a lot at the supermarket I could use the leftovers to make an omelette, at which I made a face, since that recipe is just unappealing to me, though I do eat mushrooms in things like pizzas that I don't cook at home -- and, anyways, she asked me what the recipe was for, and I said buckwheat, and she didn't know what that was, so I showed her a picture on my phone and she said that it looked like "comfort food" and that buckwheat looks like a grain, and I explained that it's actually a pseudo-grain like quinoa and it only looks like a grain, but it's actually more of a seed, and then she asked me where you get it, and I said that I got mine at the local co-op grocery store.

And, at that, she paused.

Then, "Sounds healthy," she was like. "We just eat rice."

A dream from a few months ago.

A few months ago I dreamnt --

My mother is speaking of travels when she was young, and her trip to the Galapagos, and there is a large map of Central Asia into India but somehow California is where Africa is, and there's multiple small seas in it, and it turns out that she's been to Iran, and she was doing a trip and in one place the doctors wore two-cornered hats, if you can believe that, two-cornered hats, and it's only the map that is there in my mind as she says this, and some of these travels were with her brother, back then, when she was young, but not all of them, and my eyes wander to the southeast to the areas where she had not been to...

And then I wake up.

. . .

(Her brother is my dead uncle.)

Incident on a trip to the mall a few months ago...

...when I was on the bus going home:

A group of like six or seven (black) kids who are all like eight, ten, twelve years old get on the bus at once at the outskirt of the mall area where it's degenerating into randomly-placed minimalls, and suddenly the (black) bus driver is like, "Hey man, don't you try and go by," and he calls out a (younger) boy who tried to get on the bus for free, and he says something that if he needs to use the bus and doesn't have the money, that's okay, just tell him, but don't try to pull something like that and go by, and then he lets him on the bus for free, and then the kids go and sit down, but they kind of walk around the bus some too, and you can see people quietly arrange their bags so they're safe, and then a (slightly older) girl comes up and asks me if she can use my phone to call someone and I say no, and then she goes to the other side of the bus opposite me to ask the same thing of two (younger) (Asian) women and a(n older) (Asian) woman who's separate from them, and they all pretend like they don't speak (English) and just stare straight ahead with on-guard postures and pretend not to pay attention, and then I can hear from the back that the (slightly older) girl is finally on the phone somehow and she says something about letting someone know something and they'll try to be somewhere by some time, and it's like 7pm at this point and the youngest kid is honestly like eight and there's no adults in sight, and then a bit after that we're back at the main station, and the driver gives all of them free transfers, including the (younger) boy who didn't have enough money for the bus in the first place.

. . .

More restaurant tidbits...

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

1) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker and my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker really do wonder what business and tipping was like there before COVID; supposedly, the restaurant used to be pretty packed many nights of the week, but now a lot of people have shifted to take-out, and have just never returned to in-person dining like they used to.

2) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker asks me what my favorite color is, and I'm immediately like, "The color of your eyes."

And, she's like, "Whoooooooooooooaaaa," appreciatively.

3) A (recent immigrant?) (slim) (jittery) (highly black) (African?) app delivery driver without much (English) just kind of hovers weirdly when it's time to pick up his order, and he even sits for a while in the prime window area where the customers sit and not at a table in the back, and then he disappears, and then the next thing you know, a man is waiting outside of the (women's) restroom to go in -- everyone is using the (women's) restroom, since the (men's) restroom is closed for some fixture repairs -- and then another table comes in and sits but they leave right away since a man there needs to use the restroom and goes up and sees the line, and he needs to go so bad that they can't wait, so they leave and we lose three customers, and then like five minutes after that, the first man still isn't in the restroom, he's still waiting, and then suddenly the (African?) app delivery driver comes out and grabs his order and hustles out the door, and water with a mild sewage stench is just streaming out from the bathroom door in a thin sheet over the floor, and it's a fairly busy Sunday lunch shift, and the (male) restaurant owner and a (Guatemalan) kitchen worker have to come out and unclog the toilet and mop up all the sewage-water, since it seems that the (African?) app delivery driver was doing something in there, including putting paper towels down the toilet and flushing.

"What the fuck," I was like, to my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker, who was working that shift with me.

And, I pointed out that we had signage about the paper towel thing, and he never asked to use the restroom like a lot of drivers do, and beyond that he took so long in the bathroom that he made us lose that one three-top and about $4 or more in tips each, and then who knows what effect that had on the other tips, to have sewage-water coming out into the center of the restaurant like that, even though we took care of it as quickly as we could and that whole thing maybe only lasted five minutes or so.

And, my coworker reported the driver to the app company, and I said she should block the driver so he never returned, but she wouldn't, she just put the like "Needs improvement" option and marked something about professionalism, which was pretty nice and speaks well of her, I think, though in this rare instance I do think we should have just blocked the guy, you don't need all that stuff like that in your restaurant.