Turning into the kind of people I hate.

On a trip this past summer back to the city that I used to live in, I meet my one (art school) colleague who wears (women’s) clothes at this one sushi restaurant where I know the manager, and she’s not in, but we hang around and eat and chit-chat with the bartender on duty – we sat at the bar – and when my sushi roll comes out, it turns out that it’s deep-fried.

And, I look at the menu again, and what do you know, the bottom two sushi rolls are in some special graphic box that warns you that they’re deep-fried, but I hadn’t noticed that at all.

Basically, I was one of "those" customers who orders something off the menu without really reading it, and then am surprised at what I get!

So often, we turn into the people we hate.

An observation on restaurant seasonality…

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

When it’s time for move-in at the one local university in the one college town that I now live in, there’s oftentimes customers who come into the restaurant after moving, and some order a beer right away – which rarely happens, otherwise – and others can barely string a sentence together in reply when you check on the table, they’re so braindead from moving all day.

It’s just very, very distinctive customer behavior, and it only really happens at that time of year.

Some new restaurant behavior from some (Chinese from China) people.

For a while now at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, you get international students who don’t quite understand (American) restaurant culture, and they look strangely at you when you approach the table for help, and then they start trying to flag you later when they need something.

And, this could be (South Asians from South Asia), or (Chinese from China).

And, in fact, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker has even commented to me that the U.S. is the only place that she knows of, that doesn’t really do that practice at restaurants!

Anyhow, on top of that already-present trend, towards the end of this summer there was this new development visible with like three (Chinese from China) parties that happened all over the course of like half a week.

These groups wouldn’t only try to flag you, but they’d actively call out loudly across fifteen to twenty feet of restaurant, that they needed something right then!

I think the first one was this (young like maybe 18-19-ish) (blank-faced) (kind of dumb looking) (Chinese from China) girl who called out fifteen feet to me that she was ready to order, as I had just returned from another table with an order and was clearly occupied with keying it in at the host stand.

And I missed the second one, but on a busy-ish night after seating two (Chinese from China) (late teens) (men) when they were still waiting for a friend and when several tables had come in at once, I went over to deal with another table who had precedence over them, and when she passed back from helping another table, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker said that I should bring them water. And, I was surprised, since I had just seated them and they hadn’t been there long at all, and I was going to do that in a minute, and she said no, I should do it right now, since when she was bringing out a huge tray of food for the other table a few tables away from them, they actually called out to her in the middle of that that they needed water.

Later, too, on a trip after the water delivery, when I swung back around by that table and asked them if they needed anything like appetizers or a beverage order, one of them gave me just this dirty and affronted look, like why was I speaking to him when he wasn’t speaking to me first.

“That’s it, I’m not waiting on that table,” I told my 2 other coworkers who were working then, telling them what had just happened.

And, I also clarified that when people do stuff like call out like that, we should be nice but we need to prompt them on what’s appropriate or not and how restaurants work, like, “Oh, I’m sorry, I was assisting another table, we try to help everyone in order,” etc., but the last thing we should be doing is acceding to their behavior and dropping everything and meeting their demands right then, since that would encourage them and they’ll be taught to continue that behavior if we respond like that.

And, like, pretty much at the same time as that group of (young) (men), the third incident was this old (Chinese from China) guy and his (even older) (father?), and they called over when they were ready to order, but with them it was more of a recent immigrant lower-class thing, probably – that guy could barely even communicate in English, and his (father?) not at all -- whereas with these kids it was more of an recent immigrant upper-class entitlement thing.

After I laid out my approach,, too, my one (Chinese from China) coworker said that it’s a different culture and plus in (China) people don’t look too well on people who do work like waiting tables, but I pointed out to him that we’ve always had students who try to flag you, but this is different since they’re now calling out loudly for immediate help when they haven’t really been waiting at all and you’re clearly far away and in the middle of other work for other tables.

“It’s an entitlement thing," I was like, and I reminded him of what I’d heard from my one (professor friend) who studies (modern Czech literature), that this latest batch of international students are richer, dumber, and more entitled than ever.

“That’s probably correct,” he was like, in response.

. . .

(A few weeks after that, a huge [South Asian from South Asia] table comes in, and when I’m checking in if anyone needs appetizers or drinks, one [young] [woman] just gives me a look and is imperiously like, “No, we need a minute,” trying to put me in my place, and then two guys leap in and want something to drink and an appetizer, too… Some things never change.)

Some restaurant happenings…

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

1) Like three (white) and (Asian-American) (college students?) sit outside on the patio, and when I serve them their meals, the curry of one (white) guy sloshes a little onto the broad bowl-edge, so I apologize like I always do when that messes up the plating.

“Oh, no worries,” he was like, “It’s fine.”

“Yeah,” I was like, “And if you really need to, you can always lick it to fix it.”

Then, right away when it was obvious that he didn’t know what to say, I added, “Like, if you want to put it up on Instagram.”

And, at all that he just looked at me like he still didn’t know what to say, while his one (Asian-American) friend sitting over to his left just started suppressing a laugh.

And, his friend would also say “Thank you, sir,” whenever I did anything for their table.

2) A new (townie) (light-skinned) (black) girl with a (hippie/nerd vibe) who’s returning as a fill-in waitress and I were introducing ourselves to one another, and when I mentioned my work on the one ancient language that I’ve been studying for several years now and have made myself into quite an expert in, she started saying that she’s been reading Journey to the West, and its information about celestial hierarchies of demons is quite fascinating.

Some locals:

1) The (later middle-aged) (white) woman with (pulled-back) (gray) hair who works the one stand that I always patronize at the farmer’s market says that her ragweed allergies are really bad this year, and she looked out at the field one afternoon and you could just see the wind blowing and kicking up this large yellow cloud that hung over the fields.

2) As I take a shortcut one evening like 10pm through the parking lot of the local public library, I round a bush and there is a (plump) (early 50s) (bearded) (black) man with kind but psychologically off eyes sitting on a blanket like he’s laid it out for a picnic, only it’s on the concrete in this one secluded part of the parking lot that you can’t really see from the nearby sidewalks, and he has some plastic bags and other bags scattered all around him on the ground.

3) This (very young) (slightly dark-skinned) (chubby-cheeked) (Asian from Asia) guy comes in the restaurant – he’s presumably a new student at the local university? – and after my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker takes his order, she is like, “He is Thai, I knew it,” and she keeps calling him “the nice Thai boy.”

Off-brand salt.

From now on, I am never buying off-brand salt again, only Morton’s.

The generic grocery-store brand salt that I got this summer at the local supermarket chain started off good enough, but its metal-tab top really didn’t seal tight like it was supposed to, so the salt inside absorbed a lot of water and got all clumpy and wouldn’t pour out when you needed it to, and on top of that you could see that it had so much water that it was actually leaking into the cylindrical cardboard container and warping and discoloring it, with even a little bleeding out into the wrapped-paper wrapper.

Finally one day when I was cooking and needed salt, I ended up just pulling out scissors and cut open the top of that old salt container, so I could spoon out what I needed, and after that I just sat it out on the counter so I could grab salt from it when needed, like to salt my tomatoes and cucumbers that I get at the farmers market when I cut them up for a salad with oil and vinegar and whatnot.

Over the course of a few days, however, that exposure did something, and it’s like the salt began materializing on the exterior of the cardboard carton, and now it’s all dry and crusty like some old arid salt-flat out in Utah.

Some responses to farmers market melons…

…when I bring them into work several successive weekends in a row at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, so we can slice them up and have them on plates and people can nibble on them while at work:

1) The first weekend that I do this, my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones says she likes the melon, and when I ask what do I get in return, she just holds her thumbs up in a crossed fashion so that they look like hearts like K-pop people do to signal love, now.

Only love, in return for my melon.

2) Like the second weekend that I do this, my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones says that it’s not sweet, so I’m like, “It’s sweeter than the melon that you brought in,” while my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker says that that might be the result of pesticide use being absorbed into the fruit’s flesh, like in line with what she studied back at her agricultural college in (Thailand).

3) Like the third weekend in a row, I don’t bring in a melon because everyone b*tched the last time about how they weren’t that sweet, but my one (Guatemalan) coworker who sometimes tries to f*ck with me greets me not with hello or anything, but quiero melon (“I want a melon”).