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!”