So it’s around nine in the evening, which is practically a mental game-over for me on slower nights since the restaurant closes at ten. The store’s clearing out nicely, I’m wiping down deliciously vacant tables and already practically salivating over the idea of being allowed to clock out early so I can go home and indulge in some internet-related time wasting. Sure, there are a couple parties left, but they’re small and seemingly not brain-damaged, so I’m sure the manager can handle them just fine.
But then six teenage girls stumble through the door, all laughing and giggling and talking excitably about God knows what. As any good waitress is well aware, a gaggle of giggling females, no matter what age, is usually an early sign of an imminent headache (nine times out of ten, they’re either blithering idiots unworthy of the air they breathe or completely irrational and condescending bitches). Either way, the look my boss was giving me meant I wasn’t getting off early after all.
I’m frustrated, sure, but it’s my job and clocking out before my shift should actually be over is a rare luxury, not a right, so I put down the bag of chili powder I’d been using to refill some of the condiment boxes I’d collected off the table earlier that evening and turned around with my best attempt at a welcoming smile. I greeted the party of six still-giggling girls, asking if I could get them started with anything to drink in hopes of moving their meal along rather than letting them wallow in their hilarity for half an hour. So they start listing pretty basic things (water, coke, milk tea and the like), and then I get to the last two of the bunch.
“Could we get a…green tea, please?” the smaller one asks me, her brow furrowed as though she’s confused by her own order.
I sigh and give the standard response. “We actually don’t have a traditional green tea here, it’s actually a rice tea, but it’s practically the same idea. Would that be alright?” Gotta warn people, right?
The two last girls look at each other, their faces screwed up in identical expressions of disgust.
“Ew,” the second one says, “a rice tea? Gross.” The way she’s looking at me, you’d think I just asked her to drink cockroach purée or something. But I’m a professional, so I shake off her ignorance with a shrug.
“It’s very similar to traditional green tea. Or, if you’d like, we also have a canned green tea. It’s cold, but it has the more common flavor you might be looking for.”
The girls both consider what I’ve said for a moment, and then the first one speaks again.
“Do you think you could, like, give us a little of the…rice tea to try?” She says the word rice like some Fundamentalist Christians say the word homosexual. I don’t understand what’s so damn bad about rice tea, it’s not like rice doesn’t make up half of the stuff we sell (rice noodles, rice desserts, etc.), but I agree to placate them because the exchange has gone on too long for my tastes anyway. They give me their food orders too, and I go to the dessert room to put their choices into the computer system and make the drinks.
I come back less than five minutes later, bearing a variety of drinks and two teacups half-filled with rice tea for the girls to sample. It’s not even like we charge for it, I just didn’t want to waste.
So I set the cups down in front of the Tea Girls, and they both lean forward simultaneously, sniffing suspiciously and inspecting the mildly yellow liquid like I’d gone and collected some piss to serve to them instead of actual tea. Finally, one of the girls’ eyes light up, and she reaches for a menu and opens it up to the beverages section.
“No, we wanted this one,” she says, her voice practically screaming duh! at me without actually saying it, pointing at an image and then reading slowly off of the menu like she’d never encountered these words before and she had to sound them out. “The ice…milk…green tea.” The girl looks back up at me, her expression smug and self satisfied.
It takes all my powers of restraint to keep from openly gaping at her utter stupidity. She asks for a green tea at a Japanese ramen restaurant, and somehow thinks that’ll translate into “Ice Milk Green Tea”? Not the most commonly ordered drink in the whole store, in any Japanese store, the hot tea? Not the canned beverage called, specifically, Green Tea? Both of which I recommended to her and she seemed to consider as a possibility?
I’m pretty sure my fixed smile was twitching at that point.
“Sure, I’ll get that for you right away.”
So I go into the dessert room, throw together a couple of Ice Milk Green Teas, and hand them over with some straws. The table is at peace…for now. I return to the dessert room and vent to Mina for a few minutes about how everyone is stupid and I hate them all.
Too soon I hear a bell ding, indicating that an order’s up. So I head over to the kitchen counter and grab a couple bowls of ramen to deliver to one of the back tables of two. But as I pass by my favorite table of the intellectually inept, I see one of the Ice Milk Green Tea girls struggling to put her straw into the plastic lid of her drink. Briefly wondering if I put too much ice in, and then smiling at the thought, I continued on my way to the back to drop off the ramen. But then I’m on my way back and I pass their table again…and she’s still struggling. I pause for a moment, pretending to organize some of the condiment boxes we have collected at the counter for refilling, and suddenly realize what her problem is.
What I want to say:
“Hey dumbshit, generally if you want to put the straw in, you shouldn’t hold the straw at the bottom and try to jam both your fingers and the straw itself into the comparatively tiny opening in the lid.”
What I actually say:
“Excuse me, is everything alright here?”
I’m waiting on natural selection for this one. Darwinism, make me proud.
***
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Cross-posted to the ever-delicious Even Idiots Order Pizza.
My official title at The Flintridge Press is “Copy Editor”, but usually I’m just affectionately referred to as “The Grammar Hammer”. Needless to say, the English language is my life. In the way that some are devoted to a religion or an ideal, I worship at the wayward temple of words (and occasionally alliteration) and will do everything within my power to make others feel the same affection for them that I do. Writing isn’t just something I like, it’s a passion that causes me to revere those who can appropriately place a semicolon, keeps me up at night searching for the right word in the appropriate context, and sends a sharp sting of physical pain throughout my being upon viewing a badly phrased sentence. Unfortunately, one of the greatest problems in society today is the erosion of the English language as we know it, and while some consider this decay “progressive change”, I simply see it as a disservice to the very bedrock of our existence.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m fond of the occasional abbreviation and am prone to more hideous spelling errors than most, but some of the things I’ve seen recently border on the absurd. Twice I’ve edited friends’ papers for classes and noticed that a supposedly innocent bit of internet chat-speak somehow crept into the text. From the editing I’ve done at the newspaper, finding someone who knows how to use a comma, let alone a semicolon, is a small miracle. Scanning fanfiction.net can sometimes be an absolute nightmare, what with every author claiming that they don’t care that their modifiers are misplaced or that their verbs change tenses half a dozen times in the first paragraph as they mindlessly cite “artistic license” without even really knowing what artistic license is. Do these people not take pride in their writing? They were given the gift of words to articulate their ideas, and in return the English language is brutally abused simply because these so-called “authors” have “artistic license”. Sometimes I’ll edit these abysmal fanfictions for my own personal benefit, partially out of a desire to see the work improved but mostly to relieve my frustration with its original state.
My own work is hardly flawless. To be quite frank, I consider the majority of the things I’ve written to be disastrous in nature, and I’m just as susceptible to error or ignorance as anyone else. But I certainly appreciate any critique outside sources have to offer in the ongoing and potentially eternal quest to better my skills. I plan to make a life out of my borderline obsession with editing, because while my affinity for creating my own work is unrivaled, there’s something immensely satisfying about being able to actively fix the errors I see in the written word around me. Though I’m probably merely chipping away tiny shards of a daunting iceberg that is current society’s utter disregard for appropriate grammar and punctuation, if I can help even one person understand the rules of subject-verb agreement, I’ve made a difference. And if I manage to affect change along the way, perhaps encourage others to revere words the way I do, then I’ll truly feel as though I’ve done something positive with my existence.
Writing is one of the most basic forms of human communication, second only to speaking, and the fact that people don’t respect words the way they should breaks my heart a little more every day. Too often I’m asked why I take the time to capitalize and punctuate my instant messages and texts, and my answer (“Because it’s correct”) is often greeted with typographic sighs. Good grammar and a basic grasp of punctuation are to be celebrated, not looked upon as something alien. When I read Lynne Truss’ words of wisdom in her book “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”, I wonder if a call to arms would be such a bad idea; waging war for the good of the English language is a small thank you for giving me my driving passion in life.
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Place: Tokyo Wako (Pasadena, California)
Topic: Levels of a Shit Life
“So guys, let me get this straight…there’s dead baby at the absolute bottom, then sex slave without bread, and then sex slave with bread. Then my boyfriend.”
“Dead Rwanda baby.”
“Oh, right.”
“And they say we don’t have deep conversations.”
***
So my friend has this boyfriend who is utterly convinced beyond a doubt that his life is a shithole vortex from which he will never be able to emerge, and he is content to wallow in his own pity for the rest of his life because doing something more productive, like say shutting the fuck up and dealing with it then moving on to better things in life, would somehow be “fake”. As though seeing those shining moments of good in life that, as we all know, is brimming with grief and disappointment and frustration no matter who you are, is somehow inauthentic.
Naturally, this infuriated me.
I’m a highly emotional individual. I believe in expressing every feeling that ever comes to pass in your life. So you’re feeling sad? Go bawl about it for hours, I do it all the time. Some guy at work pissed you off? Vent to your blog with all of three readers (ohhai, Waitress Blog, how are you doing this afternoon?). There is absolutely nothing wrong with bitching and moaning about what gets to you on any given day. But eventually, you should realize that while bitching and moaning is certainly cathartic, it doesn’t actually do anything to improve your situation. So go ahead and let it all out, just know that at the end of the day you need to get off your ass and be proactive if you want to see any kind of change to your situation. Because really (and this is coming from me), wallowing in your only make you feel better temporarily. And if you’re like me and you can’t exactly bitchslap your frustration across the face like you’d like to (yes, customers, I’m looking at you), then focus on something else to get your mind off of it. There is nothing wrong with focusing on the good to deal with the bad, nothing fake about losing yourself in enjoyment for a while. I’m not saying ignore your problems, obviously. But deal with them when you need to, and then kick back and let go of your anger or sadness or pain when they’re not staring you in the face and snarling like a rabid bulldog (Entitled British Fatass what?). Let yourself feel something other than your trials and tribulations, otherwise they’re just going to eat you alive for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Some people might be surprised that I’m writing this, considering all the shit-flipping I do on my blog. But really, once the work day is over and the blog entries are written (mostly for entertainment – both mine and yours – and remembrance than anything else), I let all the frustration go. And there’s nothing better after a crap day at work than coming home, showering off, then indulging in chocolate, a good movie, and good company. If anything, a bad morning shift can lead to extra appreciation for the evening’s chill/crazy/fun/whatever activities.
Now, my friend’s boyfriend is a nice guy. I like him when he’s not being such a little emo bitch about every tiny thing that happens. And I’m not saying that he hasn’t had his struggles in life even despite his suburban, private-school-educated, upper-class upbringing (I really don’t know any specifics aside from the fact that he mopes a lot and may or not be clinically depressed? Except I think that depression is over-diagnosed in teenagers anyway). The point is that everybody struggles. Everybody suffers. Pain and life hardships are all relative depending on who you are and the situation you were born into. And at the risk of sounding like I’m pulling a cop-out here, there really are sex slaves who only get bread and water for food once a day out there. And y’know what? They’re better off than the sex slaves that don’t get fed bread and water once a day. No matter what the situation, there is always someone who’s gonna have it better than you from one aspect, but there will also always be someone who has it worse in that same aspect. Hell, the person who has it better than you is probably stunted in some other way. Life balances itself out that way. Trust in the natural order of things.
Look, all I’m saying is that griping about things that have caused you setbacks in your life is perfectly normal, but moving on from those gripes and not letting them become a perpetual presence in your life isn’t fake in any ways, shape or form. It’s what makes us human.
…I might also be saying that I often want to kick my friend’s boyfriend in the face. But whatever.
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