…during this one night during the week before Christmas this past year, at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:
1) A table of four where it’s one (lower middle-class) (white) mom and her daughter and her boyfriend and some relative, only the daughter is trans and has this very flat female forehead and long straight female hair but also a scraggly blonde-brown beard, and the family relative seems not all there and orders a Mello Yello and then returns it because he doesn’t like it, and then when I ask, the mom specifies that nothing is wrong with the soda like the syrup is running out or the carbonation is wrong or anything like that, it’s just that he doesn’t like it, and so I go and I refund the soda for them.
2) A table of four where it’s like two (lower middle-class) (white) parents and their two (adult) (white) (nerd) sons, and one has long (trans?) hair and noise-cancelling headphones, and they speak so softly that I have to ask them “No ice?” after they say something after ordering a Thai iced tea – “I said, ‘A Thai iced tea would be nice,’” they repeat for me, then – and the other is (fat) and (hairy) and has a huge tablet out on the side of the table and is looking at something with video games and then like a chat message board, throughout the entire duration of the meal.
And, as I’m inputting their orders up by the host station, suddenly the mother is at my side, and I stop what I’m doing to ask her if she needs assistance, as I wonder if they decided to go and make a sudden change on their order or something.
“Are you open on the twenty-fourth?”, she’s like.
3) One table asks for boxes when they’re not even halfway done eating (!), and then when they leave, they hit the automatic handicapped door opener thing, and then after they pass through and turn around and see that the door is still paused open, they go and try to start pushing it shut.
4) A (mid 30s) (white) (lesbian) couple sit down, and when I take an order from the (fat) (arm-tatted) (butch) one, her voice is way too low, like she’s just starting on testosterone.
5) A woman at a table vaguely near the front door suddenly gets up and scampers over and without asking us at all starts trying to draw shut the thick ceiling-hung curtain that we pull open and maneuver around to keep drafts from the front door from bothering diners, when the weather gets like that.
6) When a table of three walks in – two (older) (shriveled) (college town-ish) (educated) (white) parents and their teenage daughter – I ask them if they're dining in or picking up and they say quite normally that they’re dining in, but when I then ask them how many, they suddenly don’t speak, and the wife just silently holds up three fingers.
7) When a(n early 30s) (alternative/yuppie) (white) woman orders a vegetarian dish, I ask her if it’s okay that there’s oyster sauce in there, and she’s like, “Is that vegetarian?”, and I tell her that for some people it is and for some people it isn’t, and then she’s like, “I want vegetarian,” so again I’m like, “For some people it is vegetarian, and for some people it isn’t,” and then she thinks for a few seconds, and declines the oyster sauce.
. . .
(That wasn’t the only stuff that was happening all night. I also got various coworkers to try on my holiday hat with reindeer antlers.)
No comments:
Post a Comment