A very odd shift this summer...

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

Although the dinner shift was pretty darn busy all evening long, not a single table wanted water without ice, and not a single table was larger than a 4-top.

. . .

(. . .) 

Some customers one night this summer...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, on a (very hot) summer night that started out slow and then got very busy towards the end:

1) One (tight-bodied) (middle-aged) (white) woman out catching up on the patio with her (similar-looking) friend wants to know if we have cocktails, and I say no and direct her to other alcoholic stuff on the menu, and then I have a bright idea and I say that we can sell her a glass of plum wine and some soda water and she can make spritzers herself for $8.50 and she's up for it, so I assemble a glass of wine and a glass of soda water and a glass of ice cubes with a soup spoon and a little bright silver metal ladle that we use for tom yum soup, so she could ladle out of everything and into another little glass that I brought her, and, it works, and she's very happy with that drink option.

2) Towards close, a huge group of (lower-class) (African-American) customers come in along with a guy and his kids who are semi-regular customers -- extended family? -- and some have face tattoos and a couple even seem high, like a guy wanted clarification if pad see you had rice and I said no and he ordered it, and then he wanted to know where the rice was when it was brought out.

And, there was this (small) (skinny) (self-important) (woman) with a toddler who was always on her phone, and without really asking or caring she just ordered this expensive vegan dish that the semi-regular customer always gets for his kids, and after we serve the food, she's like, "I want something different," and I check into why, and it turned out to be some situation where she blithely ordered expensive food for her toddler, and would send back anything that he didn't like (?!). 

And, I tried to clarify if she was sending it back or ordering something in addition and still keeping the first entree, and the semi-regular customer volunteered that he would take it, and then the mom without looking up from her phone was like, "No, he was playing in it and spit up in it."

(So you order this unfamiliar expensive dish for a toddler without even checking into what it is, and then you not only want something different, but you let them play in the food and ruin it first, without even breaking out a small portion into a kid size plate or bowl or something like that and checking if they like it?)

And, I was like WTF and said I'd go check on the policy for replacements, and I send someone else over to take care of them, because I find the behavior so strange and weird to be around.

"You have to remember this isn't your restaurant," my one (Chinese from China) coworker said to me, after he took the order for replacement chicken satay, and oversaw taking the previous entree off their bill. "That's the policy and she wanted to send something back, so you send it back."

"I know," I was like, "But I just can't handle that shit."

. . . 

(I've only had a few encounters with behavior like this, but it does seem like a [lower-class] [black] character-type thing where women act like bitchy prima donnas and send things back at restaurants, it's like a respect thing where they're creating situations where it's a "battle of the wills" thing where they want to order shit around and set themselves up as fickle people who you have to please, where it's like paying money to go out at a restaurant and have people kowtow to you, that's their definition of acting superior and having money, even though it's a restaurant that costs just a hair above fast food, if you really get down to it, even if they maybe don't go out to these types of restaurants so often.)

A recent period at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, this past summer:

1) We're working on a very hard word puzzle for days and it's down to 4 words, and my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones looks at it but says she can't help because she's not a native speaker of (English), but I gradually pick off 3 of the last 4 words, and the last one we know is a word at last 9 letters long that has three Cs in it somewhere and that means "culinary mixture," and after like 20 minutes when it's towards the very end of the shift out of nowhere she's like, "Concoction," and that was it.

So, I started calling her "my hero," and I even stopped by the local resale shop that has tons of offbeat goods for arts and crafts and bought an old huge track medal for a quarter, and I pasted yellow paper on each side, with one side saying "[HER FIRST NAME] IS #1", and the other side saying "CON - COC - TION."

2) When it comes time to order dessert, this (late 60s) (stringy-looking) (white) woman who's there as half of 1 of the 2 couples who are out eating together is interested in sharing mango sticky rice, but not when I go back into the kitchen and ask for her and she finds out that the key ingredient of the coconut sauce contains trace amounts of gluten and it can't be effectively remade or substituted.

And, that was after she had ordered and eaten a whole thing of fried rice that has gluten in the soy sauce, without even checking into gluten-free anything beforehand.

(Gluten-free people are freaky and erratic, since it's a pseudoscientific fringe diet and it's not like any of them actually have celiac disease or anything like that, too. And most of them look as unhealthy as f*ck, like those poor starved children whose hippie parents only feed them whole grains and herbal supplements and stunt their growth and make them look wan, to the point where a poor little 6 year-old looks like a 4 year-old and whatnot.)

3) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker tells me about how she took the one (older) (Thai-Chinese) cook to the train station, since he quit the restaurant and was going to work somewhere else in the nearby region, though he didn't say where.

And, she didn't ask about anything with his reasons or where he was going, so as to not know or involve herself any more than she had to.

(I've heard that [Thai] culture is conflict-averse like that.)

She's also worried know that the restaurant won't be the same, since he was the one who really knew how to do weird substitutions that tasted good when people wanted to omit major ingredients from dishes.

"So I know what we do," I was like, "We go around to Thai restaurants and ask for pad see you without oyster sauce, and when we find one that tastes good, we'll know that he's there, and that's how we find him again."

An evening out drinking with the (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM) (post-doc).

A few months ago in the one college town that I now live in, I went by the local brewery on a Sunday night to do some computer-work with scholarly articles that I needed to locate and request, and I ended up running into the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM) (post-doc) who I know from around town.

And, he suggested that we go get food afterwards, when the brewery closed at nine.

(That's a very [Brazilian] thing, to always go eat after you're drinking a bit; they're not so much into binge-drinking, and that's a cultural way that they pace themselves and socialize while having a night out, without getting blasted.)

Anyhow, after that, I took him around to like three or four more bars downtown, and at some point when I was encouraging him to go to another one, he turned to me and was like, "You have no limits."

I also made sure to take him to a local veterans association club where they have cheap drinks at the clubhouse bar, and it doesn't seem like it's open to the public but it is, since they have to be open to the public if they choose to have electronic slots on the premises.

"You have to visit here while you're studying in the U.S.," I was like, and the (older) (female) bartender even took him around and showed him the photos of past organization presidents of the club and the women's auxiliary -- "Women are soliders, too," she was like, "But we also have a women's auxiliary" -- and also this mosaic with a hotel's name in the front entryway, since the building used to be a hotel like a century ago.

"That's nice," he was like.

"Yes," I was like, "Until you have to go to the storerooms upstairs and you see ghosts."

Then, as we sat at the bar and were finishing our drinks, suddenly he started to notice all of the gun-themed stuff hanging all around the bar, and his eyes just got big and he leaned in towards me and was like, "What is that?!", and then after he digested it for a few seconds more, he was like, "I don't feel very supported and affirmed here."

He then fixated on one joke sign listing reasons why guns are better than women -- it made jokes like how guns work as they're supposed to all the time, but women are out of commission once a month -- and after he read a few of those jokes, he was just like, "That's so weird," and, "Let's go."

On living costs.

I knew that rent had gone way up in the area where I grew up, especially because AirBnBs have taken a lot of units off the market for tourists, but the actual cut-and-dry numbers going around now are really shocking.

Like, a 1BR is $1500 -- utilities and car payments not included! -- and minimum wage is somewhere around $12-13 an hour.

Like, when I moved from the city that I used to live in because of increasing crime and public transportation problems, cost-of-living was also on my mind, because potential increases seemed imminent.

And, at that point, my 1BR was like just under a $1000, and with utilities and public transportation, it was probably around $1250, and I was making somewhere like $17-18 an hour.

And, the tight margins of money left over each month was already draining, and the imminent increases in cost-of-living made it seem increasingly unsustainable, and, that was with a cash flow situation that is BETTER than what people in my hometown are facing now.

It really is shocking, some rinky-dink rural area, with cost-of-living patterns that make it look like what a major metropolis cost five years ago.

An old (computer programmer) friend from high school says it's the natural evolution of tourist area housing markets, but I really do think it is the housing crunch combined with underregulated AirBnB crapola and the downward pressure on wages that's been going around for decades.

It really is just shocking.

He also told me his sister living in a satellite town to a major city in the same state had her rent DOUBLE over a single year.

Just unbelievable. 

Explanations for the recent uptick in neighborhood weirdness.

Overall, it really does seem like it's the increasing homelessness and maybe the worsening economy that's driving all the weirdness in my neighborhood this summer.

The increasing local homelessness problem is well-known, and people are speaking of rent increases and housing problems, even though I'm not seeing that with local wage levels and the amount of units available and their relative prices, at least from what I can see.

(Actual houses might be another matter -- prices are going way up, so maybe that increases your property taxes and puts your house out of your income-level reach and then you can't afford your payments anymore and you end up homeless, etc.)

As my one (art school) colleague who wears (women's) clothes pointed out to me, practiced thieves don't want to go into houses where someone's living, so anyone with half a brain would have heard my box fan running at full-tilt inside my small cottage, and avoided it.

So, it's likely someone who's mentally "out there" or on drugs or both.

A (gay) (music education) (graduate student) who I know from the local brewery actually suggested it might be related to meth, the use of which has gone up a lot the last 1-2 years, he says.

Like, he's lived in his apartment for a number of years, and the past 1-2 years, there's been this explosion of Grindr profiles looking for meth use.

The one (young) (white) (female) bartender with (pussy hat) energy has also recently spread word about some meth users coming around to local bars, including this one (scrawny) (white) (female) trouble-maker who stands behind people ordering off of their credit-card tabs and who listens for their names and then when it's her turn to order, she says, "Oh, I'm with [name she just heard]," to get free drinks off of someone else's bill.

And, those stories made me think of how just several days earlier, I'd been running errands in the downtown area and I came across 2 homeless people I'd never seen before, this (agitated) (scrawny) (white) lady with (tan) (hard-bitten) skin walking all fast and funny and turning around and being like, "HEY, ARE YOU COMING OR NOT," to this equally (tan) and (hard-bitten) (white) guy with a (shaved head) who was like ten to fifteen feet behind her, slowly riding a bike that was way too small for him, so that he was like crouching on it and his knees were all the way up by his mid-body whenever he pumped the pedals 

The (gay) (music education) (graduate student) who I know from the local brewery also had an odd experience at his cottage way on the other side of town, where he lives on the second level of a building complex with open staircases, and like a week or two after my break-in attempt, he got woken up at like 5am by someone trying his door handle, and then he heard someone trying it at the apartment next to him, and then he couldn't go to sleep at all that night, though he's not contacting the police since he told the local building manager afterwards and he thinks that that's enough, unless it happens again, at which point he'll contact the police then.

And, though he says that that's far away from me, it's walkable in under an hour, and homeless people do walk long distances all around town.

My guess is that there's one or a small group of them and they've recently acquired this behavior and are maybe even teaching it to each other, and they have their standard routes through town where they go through and try this shit, and the 2-3 block area where I live happens to be one of those strips.

I do wonder how and when things will improve.

This can't be permanent? 

Addendum, on further odd happenings.

After that break-in attempt, I talked with neighbors who I saw to warn them and I immediately heard about other incidents, which led me to canvas more widely and discover still others.

(Something like that break-in attempt doesn't seem like a one-off affair, and since it's so unusual for the neighborhood, you would almost think that other stuff had been happening, but the individual people who saw the individual events were writing off their individual experiences as one-time flukes, and not realizing that they were representative of something larger.)

And, this is what I quickly uncovered had been happening in the area during like the previous 6 weeks or so:

1) At the big co-op house right across from where I live, a guy was watching TV with a friend and felt like they were being watched, and they look, and someone's staring in the window at like 11pm at night, so one quietly gets up and goes outside, and the guy is sitting up on a basement-window dormer looking in and another guy is standing on the ground beside him, both (fat) (bearded) (white) guys on the (younger) side, and when they see him, both run and go hide behind some tall bushes around the front corner of a neighboring building, and one lies flat on the ground behind some smaller bushes, so you can't see him in the dark.

2)  After that, the same guy watches the building more at night, and like 3 days later he catches a(n old) (dirty) (white?) (homeless) lady standing up on another basement dormer and looking in another window, someone who he's previously seen around and trying doors and asking people to use their showers.

3) After that, the same guy talks to someone cutting grass at the neighboring building where the guys had run and hid, and the guy says he's the owner's son, and that they've been having recent complaints of people looking in first-floor windows.

4) Like in the next block-and-a-half there's a report at one place of a run-of-the-mill opportunistic package theft, and at another place the discovery in the morning of someone sleeping on that apartment building's porch.

5) An owner of a home business with a big front porch and a fence around her yard tells me that her security camera caught people letting themselves into the yard during the day and lounging on her porch-furniture when she wasn't there, a few weeks earlier. 

6) A roommate of someone tells me that their roommate had been asleep in her attic bedroom when everyone was gone after close of semester and you can hear everything in the house, and they heard someone opening the chained-back door like two to three times to the full extent of the chain at like 2:30 in the morning, and they freaked out and locked their bedroom door and didn't call police, because they weren't sure if they were sleeping and dreaming it all up, but they also wanted to be safe.

7) A couple who live in the building where someone had been found sleeping on the porch say that one evening they were cleaning the upstairs part of their apartment until like 11:30pm -- they had lost track of time -- and then they come downstairs and as soon as they do so, someone starts knocking at their front door aggressively and like trying the door handle, and this goes on for sheer minutes as they call the police, but when the police arrive, the person is gone.

8) It turns out that at the building near me where he's lived for almost two years, my one (Chinese from China) coworker has suddenly been battling package thieves for the past few month -- after stolen packages, he put a sign up for mailpeople to take any packages that fit and put them inside the mailboxes, which led to pried-open mailboxes, which led to him getting a camera and finding footage of 2 separate people coming in off the street into the parking-lot area where the mailboxes are, and caging out stuff for theft.

9) Another neighbor who just moved in has seen someone in the afternoon walking down the middle of the street, looking into every car that they pass, although they didn't call police because they didn't know if this was normal for the neighborhood or not. 

 . . .

Overall, it seems like the neighborhood has had occasional package thefts or drunk college student antics or occasional occasional crap by the one neighborhood liquor store in the past, but nothing like this, from everything I could gather.

Just a huge leap up in activity, this summer!

Locals who heard all of these stories from me were all kind of shocked, to tell you the truty.

Historically, it's always been such a quiet neighborhood.