Workplace drama.

So, a few months ago on like a Friday night, this (skinny) (mid-20s) (mustachioed) (light-skinned hispanic) guy with vaguely (hipster) clothing comes in through the front door and tells me quite normally that he's picking up, so of course I send him to the back counter, and after he leaves, it turns out that he was all weird and just super super quiet when he went back to the back counter, like he was practically whispering the woman’s name that he was picking up the order for, to the point where my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker had to ask him to repeat the name like two to three times, before they could finally hear what it was and give him the right order.

And, after he leaves, our one (younger) (taller) (skinny) (Latino-American) coworker comes over, and it turns out that the order was for his (cool) ex-girlfriend.

“I wonder if that’s her new boyfriend,” he was like, groaning.

So, we go and take the receipt and plug it into the system, and it kicks up her name and some guy’s name, and as he starts googling the guy to see who he is, we open up the order history for his (cool) ex-girlfriend and we can see that they’ve ordered together like three times, where she always eats the stir fry that she ate when she was with him, while the new guy was trying around a few  different dishes before finally arriving at eating the same thing as her.

And, I start making jokes like he should have left a note in the bag for her, and at first I say that he should be like, “I didn’t spit in the food,” but then I say that he should have bought a mango sticky rice and tucked it in there for them with a note to his ex being all like, “Enjoy this dessert, I thought you needed something sweet,” at my saying which our one (chubby) (Thai) coworker broke out in a smile and was like, “Yes, yes, that’s the one, you should write that.”

Our one (younger) (taller) (skinny) (Latino-American) coworker then had to go out on a delivery run, and then when he came back I told him that he had left one investigative thread undone – “I’m telling you this, to help you as a journalist,” I was like, since he has a history of working on student newspapers -- and when he wasn’t sure what that investigative thread was, I pointed out that they had both their names under her phone number, and so I pull up the order history under the guy’s name, which he hadn’t looked at since we had only pulled up hers, earlier, and it turns out that they had ordered together under his name like 3 times starting like 6-7 weeks after the break-up, before she shifted the ordering back to her name for the like 3 times extending through the order on that very night.

“September?!”, he was like, “September?!”.

And, he then stated his disbelief that she had started dating the guy so soon after their break-up.

“But when did you start dating that girl you’re seeing now?”, I was like, and he did some counting in his head, and he was like, “Yeah, I guess it was around then, too,” but then his mind turned back to the situation at hand and he still couldn’t believe it, and he was like, “September?!”.

I then suggested that he send our one (chubby) (Thai) coworker to go do pick-up in his name at the bar/restaurant where his (cool) ex-girlfriend works, and he liked the idea, but he said that he would send his current girlfriend instead.

“But what if they fight?”, I was like. “Who would win in a fight?”.

And, he said that his (cool) ex-girlfriend would win the war of words, but his current girlfriend is a boxer and she’d win any physical fight.

“Then she would win,” I was like. “In a situation like that, words ain’t shit.”

. . .

(Oddly, after this he let us in on a coworker backstory, too, that the one [white] [female] [townie] delivery driver was in the same boxing club that his current girlfriend is in, and she was even a national amateur champion or something.)

A New Year’s greeting exchange.

I texted the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) who I know and his one (nerdy) (worked-out) (Brazilian) colleague a New Year’s greeting, in the one obscure language that they both know that I have been studying for potential dual citizenship purposes -

[“Happy New Year!” in that language]

and then I texted –

(That’s “Happy New Year1” in [name of the obscure language].)

- to which the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) replied back –

Vai dar teu cu

And –

That’s HNY in guarani

- to the great amusement of his colleague on the conversation.

. . .

(I think that means “You’re going to give up your ass” in Portuguese.)

The jigsaw puzzle preference of a (well-dressed) (local) (older) (white) woman…

…who I meet at the “take one, leave one” jigsaw puzzle exchange table at the local public library, as we both look through what puzzles are set out there:

Her favorite ones are the ones with gridded squares like rows and rows of movie posters, she says.

. . .

(. . .) 

Addendum.

Like the next time I wear the reindeer hat to work, a(n older) (thin) (spectacle-wearing) lady who seems like a(n educated) (liberal) and who is in there with a man who appears to be her (husband) and whose face I vaguely recognize compliments me on it, and when I tell her that I made it myself, she says that I should do the same thing for other holidays, like one for Valentine’s Day and then one for Saint Patrick’s Day, etc.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking!”, I was like.

Build-up to Christmas this year…

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

1) The (Thai) (wife) restaurant owner with the tired face buys hunter green paper napkin rings to mix in with our typical maroon paper napkin rings, so that together they’re red and green and look like Christmas.

2) I debut my homemade Christmas hat, which is the same one that I put horns on for Halloween, only now I put on big brown construction paper antlers like a reindeer, since my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones said during Halloween that I should do that for Christmas.

Only, she seems super apathetic about my hat, which I remark on to a number of people, since she was the person who had encouraged me to do that, and then she goes and bes apathetic

“That’s because she’s jealous,” says the one (Thai) (wife) restaurant owner with the tired face.

3) A big table of like 6-7 people including a high chair come in, including this (older) (scrawny) (bearded) (white) man who seems both intense and vaguely out of it, like he waves for us and says that they’re ready to order, and he like takes offense when he orders a vegetarian dish and I ask if fish and oyster sauce is okay in that dish.

“It’s under vegetarian,” he’s like, confrontationally.

“Different people have different definitions and preferences and we try to respect them all, that’s why we ask” I was like.

“So is there any sauce at all?”, too, a (younger) (white) woman at the table asks, when she orders a similar vegetarian dish but wants it without fish and oyster sauce.

(The answer is yes, because we substitute for those if they’re in there… Somehow, we’ve never fielded that interpretation of the option before, though! So malleable is language.)

Later, too, when the kid in the highchair drops some food, the old guy looks at him all exasperated and is like, “Why did you do that?!”, which makes me wonder if he has some sort of early-stage dementia, since all of his behavior is so inappropriately calibrated to all of the audiences I’ve seen him interacting with, although the woman who might be his daughter seems odd, too, so who knows, it might just be a weird family.

4) At one point this (plump) (grad student-age) (darker-skinned) (South Asian) woman with big fluffed-out hair sits at a small table at the back, and I ask her to move to the waiting area at the side since it’s getting busy and tables are filling up and we might need that table for dine-in customers soon, and she seems confused but moves, and then later I see her sitting at another nearby small table with a menu and dine-in stuff set around her, which makes me realize that she must have slipped in without being seated and assumed that people sat themselves, and then eventually we must have realized what was going on and some of my coworkers must have brought things to her.

(She leaves a normal 15-18% tip on her meal.)

5) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker says that she’s tired from working so many days in a row, and I point to my antler hat and act like I’m a reindeer and am like, “You’re tired?! I had to drag around Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus all day in their sled, and they were heavy!”

A cold snap (2 of 2): Another day.

1) When I walk into work, it’s a new month and I have to get my new timecard ready, and when I go to put it in the timecard rack right there by the ice machine, there is my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker’s new timecard, and by the part where you fill in the month, she wrote -- -- -- “last month Dec.”

2) My one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones said it was just a slow-to-normal lunch shift that past Sunday, but so many people wanted hot water with their meals instead of normal water that we actually ran out of clean mugs that we could give them (we have like 18-20 or so).

A cold snap (1 of 2): One day.

1) I wake up early and shovel before going in to work a double shift, and by the time that I come back around to my cottage from the front of the house, there’s a thin layer of snow already back where I had begun.

2) My one (chubby) (Thai) coworker calls in over the phone to order a duck soup and have it out and hot waiting for her so she can eat it before her shift starts, and I don’t recognize her voice over the phone, at first.

3) During my hourlong break, I want to go somewhere and get a hot coffee but it’s so cold, and so my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker who just got on shift says she’ll make me some good coffee with her various coffee contraptions that she’s brought into work, and so I just sit at a table at the side of the restaurant during my break and drink the coffee that she made me, without going outside at all.

4) The (new) (stoic-faced) (female) (Guatemalan) kitchen worker is coming back from the restroom and she pauses to look at these wrapped presents that we have up as like holiday decorations, and she pretends to take one for herself and walk away with it.

And, it’s the biggest one, so I remark on that in (Spanish), and she just smiles and is like, “Si” (“Yes”).

5) A very jovial (early 40s) (bearded) (South Asian) customer who’s visiting from out-of-town and eating out with his friend wants raw ginger with his tea, and so I say that we can do that for him but we request that he only put the ginger in his mug and not in the thermos, and I remind him of that again when I bring out the raw ginger, and he pretends to be confused and puts on a straight face and is like, “What, I need to put the ginger in the thermos?”, just to mess with me.

6) The one (smiley-faced) (Guatemalan) kitchen worker comes up to me and wants to know how you translate the phrase “Which one?” into (Spanish), and what it means.

7) By the end of shift, I’ve been at the restaurant all day, and I’d only been outside once, to take out the trash to the back alley dumpster as part of our end-of-shift duties.

8) At night in my cottage after I turn my lights off, I hear a loud crack from my nearby window like something could have snapped or possibly someone walked up outside and did something, and I leap up out of bed and go check that the front door is locked at 1:30am, including the outer screen door with its loose latch, and then I stay up a bit and look out through various windows and screens far away from the noise but from where I can obliquely see towards there, to make sure that everything is okay and that it’s not what I fear that it is.

Household hazard:

A small crumb-like object sitting out on my dining room table where I eat, and when I pick it up and put it in my mouth to try it, it somehow turns out to be a pebble.

. . .

(. . .)

Two recent dreams…

…that I had this past early winter:

1) Me and the one (lesbian) sister of my one (former) (assisted living client) with (disabilities) and I have second row tickets to see Paul McCartney at a smallish half-empty theater in town, and we’re hanging out towards the back with her girlfriend before the concert starts, since her girlfriend had only decided to come later and at that point that was the only ticket that she could get.

And, as we’re sitting there and talking, lights come up from behind the still-closed curtain, and you can see silhouettes of a band strewn about on raised pedestals coming through as music quietly strikes up, and as that happens, we both instantly stop talking and raise our heads and turn them towards the stage, and without even saying goodbye to her girlfriend, we just silently get up and walk towards the front of the house, to take our places.

2) I’m lying half-asleep in my bed in my bedroom in my little cottage in the one college town that I now live in, and my cat is lying next to me on the blanket and feels heavy there, so I shift positions and make it leap down onto the floor, where it runs around the room several times at high speed like a crazy person.

. . .

(I don’t have a cat.)

A challenge met with victory.

A few months ago at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, I was getting some snacks out of the one snack-bin that we have now, and there was all these new kinds of candy in it.

“Oh, there’s new candy!”, I was like, and as my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones stood there, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker told me that they both had bought some new ones and put them in there, since the last time that I had worked.

And, “Do you know which candy I bought?”, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker was like.

“Yes,” I was like. “It tastes sweeter.”

And, my one (older) (Thai) coworker who’s a whiz at the phones smiled at the sexiness of that line, but my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker just let it go by and she was insistent, she wanted to know which ones did I think she bought.

“The mango gummies and the Hi-Chews,” I was like, quickly and without stopping to think.

And, I was right.

“How did you know?”, she was like.

“Because we’ve worked together for so many years now that we’re like an old married couple,” I was like.

Addendurm.

That last convo really made me down on ever teaching college again – the student debt is just appalling – but then like right after that I saw several times that in-state schools are free for families under a certain income line, and that made me feel better, because it really does make college accessible and that would not totally pervert the student-teacher experience by making it somehow predatory and rapacious…

I had been thinking about this a lot lately, too, because during my recent conference this fall I caught up with someone who I know from grad school who had transferred to the conference’s host university after getting tenure at a low-level state school in another state, and she had been talking about how at her last school the graduation rate over 6 years was horrible and you’d get all of these poorer students that came in thinking that college was a path out and up, but instead they just got a lot of debt and not even a degree where they could hope to recoup anything like that.

That conversation really made me realize once again how people who get tenure often lack certain moral sensibilities, where they have to be okay with just horrible horrible situations going on around them, as long as they get a personal job out of it.

Which, is really not me, and is really not for me.

Two experiences of the younger generation…

…overheard at bars earlier this winter:

1) At a student-ish bar with a good weekday burger deal that I stopped through after using the campus library, two (white) (college-age) (off-shift) workers were sitting a couple of stools down from me, and the (man) was telling the (woman) about how during their recent Christmas party when they had the bar closed down for that someone went out in the back alley to smoke and they found a (homeless) man on the ground “tweaking,” and that the woman he’s usually around with and with whom he shares a dog was nowhere to be found.

2) At the local brewery that I go to, two (college-age) (white) girls are talking about their friend who graduated who’s attempting to move to the city that I used to live in, but the best that he can find for apartments is $800 for part of a 4 bedroom, and the best job that he can find in his field is $13/hour, which really won’t cover the apartment and his student debt at all.

Winter workout.

Because of a burst of snow and icy roads earlier this winter, I wasn’t able to go out for my weekly jog even with my winter weather gear, and so instead I googled high intensity workouts that I could do indoors and I found this great one that only takes 25 minutes.

Only, the first time that I did it, I could only get through 1 of the 3 main reps, it was so high intensity, and I actually felt slightly sick afterwards, it was such a shock to my body.

Like, it was amazing, it totally made me feel like a track athlete throwing up in a trashcan after being pushed to their limits, even though the main workout was just 30 seconds of activity followed by 30 seconds of rest for 6 different activities, ideally repeated 3 full times.

The next time, too, I was able to get through 2 of the 3 reps, and after that, all 3 of 3 reps.

What I love about it too is how it makes all of these muscles feel sore that I usually am not aware of, which means that the exercises must be hitting groups that I usually don’t.

And, after one of these workouts, those muscles are sore like that for like days.

What a great workout. 

A coworker backstory, both recent and far distant.

So, it turns out that my one (tall) (skinny) (techie) (Thai) coworker returned to the restaurant because he was laid off from his local programming job during a recent downsizing.

And, he had had a good severance package for like a year, but he put out over 700 applications and wasn’t getting any bites, so he decided it wasn’t worth it to apply to tech jobs anymore, and so he sought out other non-tech jobs that were easily available to him.

He said he’s also working at a bike shop, but that’s more so because he gets a discount there, like for this amazing carbon fiber bike he got, at the mention of which he pulled out his phone and showed me this super specialized bike with an aerodynamic frame and special pedals and whatnot, etc. etc. etc.

“I hadn’t realized you were into biking,” I was like.

And, he said that he used to bike semi-professiionally in his late teens and early 20s, like he would place in races and make money and stuff, and at one point he was eating upwards of 5,000 calories a day.

Then, he showed me more pictures of the bike,and how it was carbon fiber this and carbon fiber that and whatnot.

“You really like carbon fiber,” I was like. 

Then, I was like, “After the Singularity happens and we can upload our consciousnesses, you know what I think your body will be made out of ?”

“Carbon fiber,” he was like.

“Exactly,” I was like.

Two winter sights…

…during an early winter snowstorm earlier this year in the one college town that I now live in:

1) The bookbox out across the street from the local library is gone, leaving just a stand with ragged nails sticking upwards from a large squarish flat board that forms the very base of the top pedestal.

2) By the pathway to my back cottage, there’s sheets of discolored snow towards the house, and there’s just enough of it to make me look closer and realize that it’s not from some animal pissing, but rather dirty water dripping down from the roof and trickling down through heaps of snow that had fallen off of the roof, creating sheets of like light beigish-brown snow on the top.

. . .

(At the local public library, the deskworker there wasn’t aware of the bookbox issue, but asked around and found out that it wasn’t vandalism or something, but rather a precaution that people take whenever there’s a huge snow and there’s a risk that ploughs or something will go by and the snow they kick up will take it down inadvertently.)

Another day…

…at the one (Thai) restaurant that I work now, as of several months ago:

1) My one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker comes in with her two young daughters after they got let out early from school, so I go back to our odds-and-ends workbox where we keep pens and scissors and corks and stuff  and where I had put a bracelet that I had made with her youngest daughter at an event that we went to a few weeks earlier, and I slip it on so that I can wear it over to their table.

And, the youngest one notices it immediately, that I was wearing it like I had told her that I would, and she just lights up and is so excited. 

2) I think that I hear someone playing the marimba that’s part of our holiday display up towards the ) of the restaurant, only I look down the length of the restaurant and I don’t see anyone there, and it’s only when I go and help the table next to that display and a woman there is spooning ice cubes out of her glass and the metal of her spoon hits the side of the glass and makes a ringing sound, it’s only then when that happens that I hear that same ringing sound and I realize where that sound must have been coming from, all that time.

3) A group of three (late middle-aged) (STEM?) professors including one who looks very (Romanian) share a meal, and then when one of them pulls out “the T-card” and starts talking about what can get included as a professional expense, I’m like, “Oh, is that for the tea?”, referring to the tea that two of them had ordered and were drinking, only they hear that and they’re like “No,” and they don’t hear my joke at all.

4) A (fatter) (middle-aged) (white) woman with a pudgy face and glasses and curly curly blonde hair just loves our homemade salad dressing, and she is all smiles about it and just beams her big round face up at me and is like, “I could drink it through a straw.”

Signs of increasing local homelessness:

1) The local supermarket co-op does away with its seating in the covered area outside its doors, since (homeless) people had been congregating there and harassing staff and local customers.

2) The (older) (white) (female) (townie) bartender at the local brewery tells me that with the one sandwich shop that moved to a few storefronts away from them like a year ago, everyone there has been extremely happy, since they lost the homelessness problems that they had had at their last location, like people coming in and using tables and stealing bags of chips from the open racks that they had out, in addition to staff sometimes being afraid to close alone when it got quiet and they were like the only ones there, apart from the homeless people who were maybe around.

Glimpses of past selves…

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

1) I ask a solitary (brown-skinned) man if he’s picking up or dining in as he walks through the door, and as he says “For here” he devoices the final R, so I ask him if he’s (Turkish), and he seems surprised and says that yes, he is, so I’m like, ‘Two words, that’s not bad” as I go to seat him, and then as he sits down at the table I explain to him that his devoicing of finals Rs is a dead giveaway.

2) As I discuss local problems with the one (thin) (bald) (jittery) (older) (Jewish-looking) local business owner who comes in a lot, he’s in complete agreement with everything I say, and he says that I should run for office, he'd support me.

A cottage door-step surprise…

…on the first day of the new year, when I step outside to go to the basement of the front house and go do laundry:

A big brown jagged hunk sits there on the concrete slab in front of my cottage, and at first I think that it's a brick like maybe some prowler with bad intentions had put it there, somehow, but then I look more closely and it’s a dry and gnawed-up hunk of brown bread that had become vaguely block-like in shape, one presumably dropped there by squirrels who were “over it,” and so I kick it away with my flip-flopped foot and it flies towards the fence on the other side of the backyard before coming to rest under the edge of the woodpile there, and as it does that my flip-flop comes off my foot and shoots up in the air, tumbling end over end as it falls like six-to-eight feet away from me on the pathway that leads around the front house towards my cottage, as I start hopping in short stunted hops on one foot to go over to it, to fetch it.

Addendum.

A bit after this, I was talking with the one (thin) (bald) (jittery) (older) (Jewish-looking) local business owner who comes in for lunch regularly, and I mentioned how weird and even unemployable and low-life a lot of app delivery drivers are, like people who couldn’t get a job anywhere else, and how many of them come in smelling like marijuana smoke and stuff, to the point that I can smell it under my KN95 mask that I always wear at work, which is really saying something.

And, he was shocked that Doordash actually has automated driver report commands that specify things like intoxication and stealing orders and stuff, like that just goes to show you how often it must happen at places, he was saying.

A slammed evening at work.

Like a week or two before Christmas this year at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, we got totally slammed on a weekday night when it was just 3 of us working, from the moment we walked in.

And, I had picked up some specialty chocolate on sale at the local co-op and I had brought it in as a treat for everyone, and it wasn’t until like more than 3 hours into the shift that I even had a chance to open it, it was that busy…  In fact, it was so late by the time that we opened it, I wondered if we’d even have time to eat it all, since there was still some left on the plate that I had set out for the kitchen workers by the time that we starting to do our end-of-shift tasks for closing.

(“Don’t worry,” the one [older] [Thai] cook lady was like, when I pointed that out, meaning that she’d take anything that was left.)

And, even though it was busy, I was having a good time and chit-chatting with customers, like a table full of professors who were there for a business meal and who I was trying to convince to get dessert.

“What, no fried banana on the [name of the local university]?”, I was like.

But then, it wasn’t until after the rush that I found out that we actually had had two different orders stolen by two different app delivery drivers, including one by a guy who was shamelessly doing it right in front of me.

One was some UberEats guy who was waiting an incredibly long time for his order because the kitchen was so backed up, and when he finally got it, he canceled the pick-up from his end and walked out and kept it, and it wasn’t until some other UberEats driver showed up and wanted the same order that we realized what had happened.

The other one was a lot more insidious, this one (mid 30s) (dark-skinned black) (male) Doordash driver who I had seen sitting around waiting, and who when I came back to the counter was carrying a big take-out bag and asked me for a fork and napkin and so I ran behind the counter and got him one…

As we pieced it together later, when he first came in, he walked past the edge of the counter to the unpaid orders that customers place over the phone, and he was looking at that ticket when my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker saw him doing that and was like “No, go sit down, that’s not your order.”

And, he waited and got all three of his Doordash orders, walked them out to the car as we confirmed them gone, and then he came back in and waited some more, until we were all busy and no-one was by the front counter, at which point he walked over and picked up the huge order whose ticket he had looked at – it was an expensive one, too, with stuff like seafood fried rice – and then he just stood there like it was his, and when I ran by he even asked me for a fork so he’d have something to eat it with, since I’d never have imagined that he took the order like that, it only briefly crossed my mind that maybe he was being too weird and conscientious about the app order, every once in a while we get app delivery drivers like that, but I immediately thought that maybe he could just be a customer who had been waiting for his own order, too, and so rather than checking if a fork was in the bag, I immediately ran behind the counter and got him one since that was quicker and I needed to be onto the next task.

We immediately blocked him as a driver afterwards – Doordash lets you do that, although I don’t think UberEats does – and my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker said we should maybe even put a photo of him on the front door saying he stole, just like they do at H-Mart.

“But then I would have to put a picture of you on the front door,” I was like. “SHE STOLE MY HEART.”

Later, too, at the end of the night, I gave her like five dollars in quarters for her laundry and she gave me a five dollar bill, and I asked her why she didn’t count the quarters that I gave her, to make sure that it was really five dollars.

“Because I trust you,” she was like.

“We trusted the Doordash driver, too,” I was like.

Restaurant people:

1) The (college-age) daughter of the (Thai) restaurant owners at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now had joined a sorority a while back, and when I ask her how that’s going, she says, “Expensive,” and she then explains that it ends up costing like $5,000 a year in totalled continual costs, which she hadn’t expected.

2) When after a day at the campus library I swing by a grocery store in the student part of town to pick up some avocados – I had run out and I needed some for my typical morning breakfast, but I didn’t have time to go to the usual grocery store near my house – I walk in and right there like two aisles in is this (early 50s) (white) couple who I know from the restaurant, who live an hour away but come through town once a week for something and so often come in to our restaurant.

“Oh, it’s our friend from the restaurant,” the wife says.

And, it turns out that their daughter has some big concert coming up and she has like four solid days of evening rehearsals, and they’re schlepping her over everyday, and they have never even been to that grocery store before, they just went there to get some shopping done while she was in rehearsal, and I say that I’ve been to that particular store before ,but otherwise it’s pretty rare that I go there, too.

“Isn’t that funny,” I was like.

And, I said that they should probably just rent an Air BnB or something and stick their daughter in it all week, she’s probably old enough and prices wouldn’t be too bad what with a lot of the students out of town, and they said that her choir teacher actually had said that she could stay with her family during those rehearsals, and maybe they would do that, for a day or two, but they weren't sure yet.

I then excused myself to go get my stuff, since I had to run that errand quick before going to meet a friend for dinner nearby. 

Some recent life tidbits:

1) Even though it’s a large, well-known insurer, my new ACA insurance plan company is extremely disorganized, where they don’t release in a timely manner the first premium bill that you’re supposed to pre-pay so that you “lock in” your coverage for the upcoming year, so I go ahead and set up my out-of-pocket premium information in the system and look up my amount due through the government award notification letter about my subsidies, then I pre-pay that amount so that they have the money in advance and the bill gets paid whenever it comes due, or so that I have evidence of attempted payment in case something gets messed up and they try to say that I didn’t pay the first premium in time and they attempt to deny me coverage.

2) When I tell my mother over the phone about how I read in the local newspaper that a famous Olympic athlete had attended church services at a church a few blocks from my cottage that she and my dad had passed by and seen when they had visited me over a year ago, she immediately asked if he was Catholic.

“No, Methodist,” I was like.

“Well, we’ll forgive him for that,” she was like.

3) After his Thanksgiving party, the one (gay) (Brazilian) (STEM post-doc) who I know saves the turkey carcass for me so I can make broth, after I tell him that it’s worth saving for that purpose and he should do it.

4) When it’s a snowy day and I go into work, I forget to take my indoor shoes with me, so I have to wear my light snow-apporpriate boots all shift, at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now.

5) As I eat my post-shift soup there – it’s better if you eat it there, it’s one of those dishes – my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker comes by with a specialty chicken dish modified with potatoes and a lot of spice that a regular customer orders, and she asks me to try a piece, and I do, and she asks if it’s warm, and I say no, and she says that the guy ordered it and said it wasn’t warm, and so they reheated it on the skillet and brought it back to him and he tried it and he said it still wasn’t warm, but she doesn’t believe him.

“It’s not warm,” I was like, bluntly, and we couldn’t figure out what happened, but I kept affirming that if I was him, I would send it back, too, since it’s not like the dish is usually like.

So, since I already had one mistake to take home that day, we left it out for the next person who would come on shift at 5pm -- our one (Chinese from China) coworker -- and I said that I would stop through to potentially pick it up afterwards, if it turned out that he didn't want it (he didn't).

A story of a life milestone, and turning-point.

A few months ago the one (gay) (Colombian) (STEM) grad student who I know from around town had his dissertation defense, and his family came to visit him for it, to see it.

And, his mom had visited him here before, but not his father, and it ended up being this whole thing for his father, where he saw this giant campus all at once and then this professorial gathering where his son had to speak on his work, and it just made this gigantic impression on him, and like during the entire dissertation defense he was crying, to the point where my friend tried not even to look towards that part of the room, it was so distracting.

“In my entire life, I never thought that I would have a son who did something like this,” he said that his dad told him, and after that his family went on without him to go visit his aunt and her family in Texas, and his uncle told him that his dad just could not shut up about his dissertation defense when he was there, it was like he would just go on and on and on and there was nothing else that he would talk about, just only that.

And, he also said that after that, his father started relating to him differently.

Like, he was looking for things to do with his parents, and they don’t like museums, but they like to eat, so when he took them to see some monuments in a fairly nearby big city, he made sure to take them out for ribs afterwards, and he somehow got into a fight with his parents because they each wanted to order a whole thing of ribs and he said that that was too much food for them, and somehow it became this whole big thing and they all started arguing and everyone got mad at him.

And, because he later got ashamed at the fight, he went and apologized and he said that he hoped that he didn’t ruin everything – “You did,” his mom was like – “She’s not a person who comforts,” he said – but, his dad on the other hand was relating to him like an adult, and he’s always been known to have a temper, and he said something about how sometimes you get mad and you get carried away, and it was okay, and he was just relating to him like an adult, now.

“So did they eat all of the ribs?”, I was like.

“Yes,” he was like.

“Wow,” I was like. “Then what were you arguing with them for? Maybe you did ruin it.”

A kitchen happening in my one small cottage that I now live in:

A raw onion that I had been using for my usual morning toast-and-raw-onion-and-avocado breakfast sat out on the refrigerator rack and it was almost done, it was like just one thick ring that was left, and when it gets accidentally knocked off from there it falls to the floor and the onion’s internal rings decouple from one another so like one small one is here and one bigger one is a bit farther over and then one even bigger one is even a bit farther than that, as if it bounced and skittered and left a small ring wherever it hit, until no more were left to decouple and everything had settled down to a rest.

Corporate scams.

I really do feel like corporations are increasingly trying to scam people, where they put in false and inflated charges and try to avoid doing stuff in writing and just overall they try to make you fight it, in really insidious and nasty ways.

Like, after my recent ambiguous car damage with Enterprise, they sent me a hugely inflated bill for like $2500 that included charges that weren’t contractually valid like lost use and depreciation, and they tried to fold in repairing random pre-existing dints that fell below the contractual damage threshold, and beyond all of that they could never provide the damage report that I filed by phone the day after the damage even though the staffer on the phone said that it was time-stamped for insurance purposes and that I could get it later from the local franchise.

(“They did this to you because you were a nice guy,” my [West African] mailman told me, saying that I should never have reported any marginal damage at all, in the first place.)

I mean, I sent a letter and challenged the bill and they ended up waiving all the charges, but the whole thing was just slimy, like Enterprise wasn’t even trying to read the contract and do the right thing, but instead just used it as an excuse to try to run up charges and fuck you and/or whatever insurance you carried.

It brought back memories of the anesthesiologist that I had for my first required-by-my-family-history colonoscopy, where they were out-of-network but they legally could only charge in-network, but they sent me an out-of-network bill anyways and they would never run it through insurance even though I demanded that in writing, and then they sold the bill off to medical debt companies like it was valid debt when it wasn’t that at all, it was just some made-up charges.

(“The scam is real,” my one [art school] colleague who wears [women’s] clothes said when I showed him the bill and told him about the situation.)

Then, the debt companies wouldn’t run it through insurance because that should have been done by the provider, not them, and it was just like this zombie bill with no validity that I got a letter about every once in a while and that lasted until like 2-3 years later when a local church bought up the medical debt for pennies on the dollar and waived it as some sort of jubilee initiative, which is nice, I guess, but which also makes me wonder how much of medical debt figures that you see cited around everywhere are due to this fraudulent billing and not due to people’s actual need and inability to pay.

And, that hit me totally like a story that I saw in a local newspaper, where a local ambulance company appeared to have been automatically billing people improperly for out-of-network services and then making them fight it, rather than trying to actually bill what was actually legally valid and actually owed…

And, that reminded me how several years ago at the tail end of the pandemic I had a Greyhound busride to a nearby big city and they never sent the bus but they also never officially canceled it and so they tried to claim that their policies don’t offer refunds for delayed busses, and I had to contact the state attorney general’s office to get my ticket price back.

Like, they were trying to not produce paperwork by which you could show that the bus was canceled, so as to to attempt to just improperly keep your money! Like, you can’t set up a bus or a plane and sell tickets and then cancel the service and keep all the money, but that’s what Greyhound was trying to do!

I also recently had an experience with my electrical supplier, where after my yearly contract expired they were jacking the kilowatt hour price by 25-30% and so I switched to community solar but couldn’t be placed right away, and so I called my previous supplier to cancel out my contract at the designated number and left the message, but they never canceled my contract and I ended up getting my next electricity bill at that higher usorious price.

And, when I called again, that same number was also busy with no reps available, and it again led me to a voicebox to leave a message and no-one ever called me back from there.

Like, they must deliberately set it up that way, so it seems like you can cancel your contract, but it doesn’t leave a written record and they can continue on with their services and overcharge you!

This density of interactions with slimy companies is just astonishing to me – this must have always been around, but it seems to be getting worse…

I was mentioning this to my mom, and she said she recently had a $35 surprise “phone transfer” fee when she had to get a new smartphone, and she had to fight that, too, since no-one ever told her that that was a thing when she was buying her new phone, even though the older lady who helped her set up her new phone was very honest and very good and helped her quickly and well with everything.

What a world we live in.