CONTENT WARNING: Violence
 

I was a shift manager working my last night at this location of a fast food restaurant. We had been dealing with a guy who would constantly call to speak to his girlfriend while she was working. Recently, we had begun to refuse to put him through to her.

On this night, I was called into the drive-thru. I opened the window and saw that same guy. I told him that his girlfriend was working, and he would have to wait until her shift ended. He spat in my face.

I closed the window and started to walk away. He jumped out of his car and began smashing the window with his bare fist. I could see blood on his fist and on the window.

I hurried back to the manager’s desk, picked up the phone, and dialed 911. The next thing I knew, he had ripped the phone off the wall and was beginning to throw a punch at my face.

Unfortunately for him, he was standing in front of our maintenance man, who outweighed him two to one (all muscle). The guy found himself forced to the floor with his arms pinned behind his back.

The police showed up not two minutes later. After an extensive conversation with me, they carted the guy off to jail.

And me? I got to spend my last night there waiting for hours for the window repairman to arrive. Of course, I was on salary, so I didn’t get overtime.

This story reminded me of a similar experience. In Australia, fish and chips shops are very similar to the British variety: typically small, independent fast food shops that serve deep-fried battered fish and potato chips (fat fries), amongst other things, cooked to order. Though they are independent, they typically have similar menus with similar prices, so you know what to order even if you have never been to that shop before.

I’m visiting my newish boyfriend, who moved from interstate a short while before we started dating. He and his friends haven’t had dinner, so he and a mate are heading out to get fish and chips for everyone. I’ve eaten, but I love me a deep-fried scallop (shellfish), so I ask for two of them.

They return with a single butcher paper parcel containing all the food the group ordered. It’s tightly wrapped to keep everything warm, and they open it in the middle of the table. I am scanning the spread to find my delicious morsels. Everything is deep-fried, and most of it is battered, so I have to go by size and shape. There are several fillets of fish, a lot of chips, a handful of dim sims (do not ask!) and some “potato cakes”, which are thin slices of potato, battered and deep-fried. I am not a fan. Nothing looks like a scallop.

Me: “Where are my scallops?”

[Boyfriend] points to the potato cakes.

Me: “Um, I wanted scallops, not potato cakes.”

Boyfriend: “Oh! In Queensland, we call them ‘potato scallops’ or just ‘scallops’. Sorry.”

So, I think, “Isn’t language interesting? Every day, I learn something new.” Well, it’s time to put that learning to use.

Me: “Ah! So, in Queensland, what do you ask for if you want the shellfish?”

Boyfriend:  “Scallops.”

I learnt to be very specific with food orders with him. I also refused to call peanut butter “peanut paste”. We must have standards.

Related:
Chipping Away At The Confusion

I worked with a polyamorist who would not talk about anything other than his multiple girlfriends. We had an old man come in to buy candy for his wife on their forty-seventh wedding anniversary, obviously proud of his long and stable marriage and with a lot of nice things to say about his wife. The polyamorist told him, “Oh, that’s great. My anniversary with one of my girlfriends is this week, too. Yeah, ‘girlfriends’. I have two. And they know about each other.”

When one of the other managers asked him why he talks about it so much, he told her that he thinks it makes him seem more impressive to other men.

Manager: “You do realize it has the opposite effect, right?”

Coworker: “What do you mean?”

Manager: “‘Any man who must say, “I am the King,” is no true king.’”

Coworker: “Is that some boring Shakespeare crap?”

Manager: “Game Of Thrones.”

Coworker: “Whatever. I don’t watch TV; I’m too busy banging both of my girlfriends!”

He was told to at least stop talking about it with the customers or he’d be let go.

He lasted three more days.

After many years of dating, my boyfriend and I decided to move in together. One thing I was super excited about was being able to cook for him. I grew up eating different recipes from around the world, and before my father died, he was able to teach me many different recipes.

One week after we moved in together, I had the day off and my boyfriend didn’t, so I decided to surprise him and cook for him. I was able to make a Caribbean/Mexican fusion bowl for him with jerk shrimp and mango, sautéed vegetables, and homemade guacamole over Spanish rice. Then, to my surprise, my boyfriend came home with a container of food his mother had made us. (She lives across the street.)

Don’t get me wrong; I was happy she was thinking about us, but his mom can’t cook. Her opinion of cooking is mashing everything together and boiling it or frying it until it is dark brown. Nonetheless, we put my bowls in the fridge and ate what his mom had made. We had the bowls for breakfast the next day.

After that, whenever my boyfriend had work, I would try to cook something nice for him: Gumbo, Korean rice dogs, Sushi, mocco locco, honey-glazed salmon, etc. No matter what, he would always come home with containers of food from his mother, and whatever I made would be stored away until the next morning.

One day, my boyfriend was working a closing shift, so I decided to try one last time. If he went to his mother’s to get more food, I would eat my food for dinner that day and would stop cooking dinner for him for a month. While I was simmering the food on the stove, there was a knock on my door. I opened it, and to my surprise, it was my boyfriend’s mother with thirteen frozen pizzas.

Mother: “Is [Boyfriend] home? I texted him asking him to come over after work, but he never came.”

Me: “Oh! He’s working a closer. I’m just making some dinner.”

His mother went over and inspected what I was making.

Mother: “What is that?”

Me: “Rogan josh.”

(Editor’s note: rogan josh is a curry dish originating in India.)

Mother: “Good thing I brought these; I don’t think my son should eat stuff like Rohan Seth.”

I stared at her, open-mouthed, and then went back to making sure it didn’t burn. [Mother] opened the freezer to put the pizzas away, lecturing me about how I should stop trying to poison her son with “gross ethnic food”. I angrily glared, but I had an idea. The food was done, so I grabbed a container and went to pour the food into it.

Mother: “What are you doing?”

Me: “Every day I try to cook for my boyfriend, you insist on him eating your food, and my food is never even tasted first, so I may as well give this to his father. I’m sure he’ll enjoy it, and it’ll actually get eaten fresh.”

[Mother] gave me a look of rage as I offered her a spoonful. She took a bite, went, “Hmph,” and left, taking the pizzas with her.

Later that night, when my boyfriend came home, we discussed what had happened. He wasn’t thrilled; he said his mother had apparently told him I would appreciate not having to cook for him, and that’s why he kept bringing home her food, and we actually ate the food the day it was cooked.

His mother sometimes drops off frozen food, but it goes into the freezer for days we both work late. Otherwise, he now says, “No, thank you.”

Full disclosure #1: I honestly wouldn’t know where to put this story: “Right”, “Working”, or maybe even “Romantic”. And that’s because of full disclosure #2: I made it up. Well, sort of — I did it subconsciously. It’s about a weird dream (like an actual dream, in my sleep, not a metaphorical one) that I had about an odd customer request at the grocery store where I worked at the time.

It also involves my girlfriend at the time, who was of Korean descent. The grocery store where I worked was pretty big and prided itself in having a vast product range, including quite a lot of Asian food products. All of this fed into the dream’s storyline.

In my dream, a coworker comes up to me to ask for my help with an Asian food product that a customer is looking for. She says she’s pretty sure we don’t have it, but maybe I can help anyway because I’m a bit more familiar with that stuff since I have a Korean girlfriend. (This has happened before in real life; having a Korean girlfriend made me the closest thing they had to an actual Asian or Asian-descended employee!) So, I go up to the customer and ask him what he’s looking for, and he goes, “Kimchi Schnapps.”

Now, if you’re Korean, or at least familiar with Asian cuisine, you’ll know, A, what kimchi is and that it’s THE national dish of Korea, as well as, B, that Kimchi Schnapps doesn’t exist. So, you’ll know how absurd this request would be in real life. (If you don’t, imagine being asked for coleslaw liquor.) That’s why it stuns me so much that I just repeat it questioningly.

Here’s the thing, though. I’m a sleeptalker, much to the annoyance of [Girlfriend], who’s a relatively light sleeper. So, while I had slept silently next to [Girlfriend] up until that point, I not only said, “Kimchi Schnapps?!” in my dream, I said it out loud. In my sleep. In the middle of the night.

[Girlfriend] and I woke up and, after taking a moment to process this, we broke out in fits of laughter, through which I tried to explain this dream to her — a scene that repeated twice the next day when we told her mum and sister about it. Plus, it led to the phrase, “How about you drink a Kimchi Schnapps first to calm down?” becoming an inside joke for us.

The relationship ended badly several years later, but I’ll always remember this as one of the funniest moments we shared.

So, you tell me, who was at fault here: the (admittedly not even real) customer for having an impossible request, my store for not carrying that product, or me for waking [Girlfriend] up by sleeptalking?