…at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:
1) A six-top of (college-age) (South Asian-American) (females) come in for a birthday, and they’re confused with what to do with the cake – the two who arrive first give it to us and tell us to bring it out at the end, and then they say it should be out already at the beginning when the birthday person arrives to surprise her, but when I ask them if they wanted it trayed up to eat first, they decide against that, and they then decide that they want it out at the end, again – and finally everyone arrives and they have a big meal and I go to take a picture for them when they’re in the middle of eating, and all of their plates are neatly aligned down the center edge-to-edge all the way down, like I’ve never seen happen with a table before when they eat family-style.
“Are you guys engineers?!”, I was like, pointing that out.
(They were.)
. . .
2) A customer requests her fork, because she unwrapped her napkin and found two spoons in it, rather than one fork and one spoon.
(Perhaps because I had word puzzles set out to look at, while me and other people were wrapping silverware?)
. . .
3) A (master’s student-age) (South Asian from South Asia) couple come in on a date and after some time when I approach their table for any beverages besides water or anything else they might need right away, they look at me like dirt, and they say they need more time, and the girl is like “We just started looking at it,” and it’s partly a communication-functional thing where they don’t have the right words to respond and say they don’t need any help right then – like, “No thanks, we’re good for now” – but it’s also this attitude thing on their part, where they don’t like me being out of place and they don’t like me approaching them tableside on my own initiative.
So, I don’t wait on their table for the rest of the night, and my one (Chinese from China) coworker takes it over, and he says they’re pretty normal with him.
But, he does start reflecting at some point, that behavior like that could be a refraction of the caste system brought over here to (the United States), and I tell him that that’s what my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker and my one (newer) (taller) (Thai) coworker were saying easily over half a year ago, about stuff happening like that.
(The couple leave like a $1.65 tip on a $53+ dollar bill, too, to round it up to $55… We should have made sure to keep an eye on them, to challenge them… What a really shitty combination, caste system condescension and cheapness, two subpar manifestations of a broader lack of being “with it” with cultural norms that they should be aware of and adapting to.)
. . .
4) During my hour break between shifts, I’m getting cold brew coffee at the local brewery and doing some work online, and out of the corner of my eye I’d seen the one (older) (curly-haired) (white) customer-lady who comes in with her husband and is a bit like the Lovers skit from Saturday Night Live, and after a while she comes around to all of the tables with a plate full of cookies and cupcakes and dessert-bars and whatnot for people to get, since she was part of a table celebrating a birthday and she wanted to share leftovers with everyone.
And, she comes up to my table where I’m unmasked, and I’m like, “If it’s not Thai food, I don’t care,” and it takes her a few seconds to recognize me, and then she’s like, “Heyyyy!”, and I then pick out a few cupcakes and stuff for me to eat along with my coffee.
And, I comment that the roles are reversed now between us, that is, customer and server, and I say that she’s doing great, and after she goes over to some other people by the bar near me, I call her back and tell her that she is doing great, but she needs to lift out from the core when she holds out the plate of desserts for people to pick from, otherwise she’ll mess up her lower back.
(When I leave, I wanted to leave a dollar bill like a tip on my table and direct her to go get it, but she had already left by that point… She must have brought the desserts around to share as one of the last things she did before saying farewell and taking off from the birthday party.)
. . .
5) When I had slid in my laptop into my bag at work and accidentally let it drop in the last inch because I thought it was already setting in the bottom of the backpack and had let it go, I then began to worry about it a lot, especially whether it would even work at all the next time that I turned it on.
And, not only did it work, but my messed-up keys on the laptop keyboard began working again, so I no longer need to use an external keyboard that I had bought as a work-around to get more life out of my computer before I have to go get a new one again!
(“To make a thing work, sometimes you need to shake it,” my one [chubby] [Thai] coworker solemnly observed, when I told her about that unexpected turn-of-events.)
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