A day at work...

...a few weeks ago, at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, where I now work at:

*) Before work I'm off the bus and dawdling around the back of the building talking with my parents on the phone because I only start work in like ten or twelve minutes, and I look across the (busy) street and there's a squirrel crawling on the top of the front tire of a parked truck, like moving back and forth and looking upwards like it's looking for a place to ascend more, but it can't find any, so it finally scampers down the side of the tire and off towards the sidewalk somewhere.

1) I brought in my potter-made ceramic mug from home to put through the barside dishwasher along with my portable coffee mug, since they're so stained inside and I don't have a dishwasher at home and they really need to be cleaned.

And, they came out slightly better, but with still a lot of black gunk inside.

So, imagine all of that inside of me.

2) The one (quiet) (Asian-American) guy who does hosting came up to me and said he'd watched Blue Velvet, since we were talking TV the previous week and I had asked him if he'd ever watched Twin Peaks.

And, after that conversation, I realized that I should have told him to go and watch Blue Velvet, and what happened, but lo and behold, he found his way to it anyways somehow.

"Fuck Heineken," he was like. 

And, I asked him where he grew up and it was in a rather large city in the state, but not the largest.

"Because small towns are all like that," I was like, referring to Blue Velvet.

3) The one (quiet) (introverted) (tatted) (white) manager is there but not managing, so she's in a logoed old black t-shirt from the restaurant, instead of her simple and elegant black trousers and like soft knit sweaters and stuff that she usually wears.

And, the one (young) (taller) (macho) (Guatemalan) cook popped in after getting back from his vacation to Mexico, and he was sitting at the bar in his civvies eating a burger and having a soda and what appeared to be a glass of red wine.

"What is happening here?!", I was like, referring to them both being in non-normal clothes. "I feel so disoriented!"

4) As we're almost closing and I'm spot-sweeping, the one (big personality) (redheaded) (Irish-American) owner calls me over to a table where she's sitting with a couple regulars, and she asks me to get her a glass of rose, since she's drinking what they're drinking.

"Should I put it on your tab?", I was like.

"Yeah, put it on my tab," she says, raising her eyebrows theatrically.

And, after I get the wine from my one (affable) coworker who was in the (military), I ask him if I should tell her that he reminded her that if she doesn't close out her tab by the end of the night, we're taking it out of her paycheck.

"Yeah, go for it," he's like, and I do.

(That's a semi-regular reminder from her, when people aren't paying their tabs.)

5) When it's almost close, I get the broccoli, cheese, and mushroom soup and I put it in a new container to cool down, but the one (straggly-bearded) (thin) (white) (stoner) cook sees me doing that and says I did it right, only we're throwing that soup out tonight, we're not saving it, and he apologizes to me for my doing that extra work.

"Then wait," I was like, moving towards the door to go get a to-go cup to dump some soup into, "If we're doing that, I'll grab some to go."

And, he's immediately like, "I would do that at your own risk, it's a week old and the broccoli was already starting to go when we made it...", so I'm like, "Never mind," and I give up on that food in a way that's quite unlike me. 

6) At that same table of regulars after the owner leaves, I ask the (shrunken) (old) (white) lady who's a regular and who always leisurely downs a bottle of wine or two with a friend for hours if she wants to use "tap to pay," and automatically she's just like, "What do I have to do, dance?!"

(She was joking. And, great pun.) 

*) I get home and I crack open a (small) (orange-fleshed) heirloom watermelon that I had in my fridge from the farmer's market, only to discover that it appeared to be going bad, like a slight hiss escaped when I cut it open, and it seemed inside almost like it had been frozen and then thawed out again, like from sitting too close to the back wall of my refrigerator when the temperature went wonky.