Fugitive in Oceanside

Update: Police catch felon in Oceanside: Link to article

Excitement today in Oceanside. I'm sitting around listening to Michel Lewis explain Collateralized Debt Obligations on NPR when I hear an aggressive, very loud voice yelling, sounding like from almost inside the house--I assume it's some idiot trying to sell me something or somebody is pissed-off and has come to the wrong door.

I start to walk down the stairs and say "Who am I speaking to?" As I come to the landing I see a burly, round-headed guy holding a dog on a choker chain. He's standing at the open sliding-glass patio door wearing a faded orange T-shirt with a police badge hanging round his neck like a medallion. I realize they he has been yelling something like "are there any pets in the house? Is anybody in the house?" There are about a half-dozen men with him, and when he sees me he tells me to come over to him. For a moment I have a hard time trying to make sense of this and after he tells me again to come over to him I ask who they are, as my brain is trying to catch up with a crowd of policemen, half in T-shirts, half in uniforms.

I walk out through the kitchen and onto the cement patio in my bare feet and shorts and answer a few rapid questions: "Is anybody else in the house? Does anybody else live here? What is your name? Did you hear anything?"

I explain that there are three other guys who live in the house and as far as I know I am the only one here right now. No, I didn't hear anything.

They ask if they can go into the house to search for the fugitive. I make a quick mental inventory of my room and the house and I can't think of anything I'm doing that I need to worry about, legally speaking, though I'm not sure about my roommates. I say "I can let you into the house, but I just rent one of the rooms."

"We'll have to go inside and check anyway, just for your safety," one of them replies. Can you just hang out here? Two or three go inside, bristling with weaponry; as one turns his back I see four or five shiny rectangles which my Hollywood-trained brain tells me are ammunition clips for an automatic pistol.

Another officer--tall, husky, and dark-skinned, in baseball cap and white T-shirt and again accessorized with the cop-badge medallion, pulls out a notepad, asks my name, writes it down, the address, gets my phone number. He asks if I have ID on me and I tell him it's in the house. He asks if I know my driver's license number and I say no. I can't help but feel that he's just filling time and doesn't need this information, but it seems reasonable enough.

One uniform stands near the back wall of the property with a German shepherd. He talks to the baseball cap next to me about where the guy jumped over the wall and says he hasn't tried to use the dog to pick up the scent trail.

The officers come out and ask me what room is mine. I tell them it's the one in the front, with the door open. They ask me if my roommates always lock their doors before they leave and I say I think so but I can't say for sure. They talk back and forth reassuring each other that they've checked everything and nobody's here. I go back inside and tell them I'll lock the doors and just before I close the back I say "thanks guys," to the officer closest to me. He's in full uniform and wielding a black, rifle-like weapon but with a muzzle that seems to end in a solid, black cylinder.

"You're welcome!" he replies. He seems surprised, pleased, and eager to move on with the search. I lock the sliding-glass door, then go and check the rest of the doors. As I walk back up to my room, I look around and try to think of places where somebody might hide. There isn't anywhere. It's all clear.

Looking out my front window, there are three or four police cars on the street; I see officers going into the backyards of other houses. A police chopper circles overhead and I see a bright-flash of white light like you see from stop-light cameras. The helicopter starts broadcasting:

"Oceanside Police!"
"Looking for a fugitive!"
"Hispanic male!"
"Five Foot Nine!"
"Shaved Head!"

The chopper circles, repeating the message about a half-dozen times, and slowly ascends. One by one the officers and the patrol cars move off. I see the recycling containers on the street in front of the house and I wonder if all of the commotion has preventing the trash company from picking them up.

Tim Drinks All of the Diet Pepsi in China Becomes Infatuated with a Chinese Girl

Those who know me well know of my 12-pack-a-day Diet Pepsi habit. I don’t smoke, I drink beer now and then, but never in excessive quantities, I have no other major vices except perhaps eating too much ( a behavior that bodes ill for the waistline of this chair-bound computer programmer ). Diet Pepsi is my great addiction, one I do not put aside just because I have temporarily migrated a dozen time-zones.

So it has been a happy surprise that I have been able to buy as much diet Pepsi as I have needed…until today. Apparently I have bought every last can of PEPSI light (as my libation of choice is here named) that is to be had in Dongguan, a city of some 6.4 million thirsty Chinese. The company driver was once again sent out to secure a couple cases of diet Pepsi, expected price about 95 renminbi (say a buck and a half) and returned with a scant 31 cans—all they had left. He had searched two stores including the local Wal-Mart, a two-story warehouse thronged daily with swarming shoppers pawing at heaps of neatly piled towels, books, and bamboo mats. No more Diet Pepsi was to be found.

I drank all of the diet Pepsi at Wal-Mart!? Bu-Hau! ( Not Good!)

But the more interesting story is my infatuation with a lovely young Chinese foot-massage girl named Ying Ying. A foot massage is something of an institution here, one goes and has ones feet bathed, ones shoulders, neck, back, hands, arms, and finally, one’s feet massaged deeply, sometimes painfully, but ultimately in a caring, indulgent, relaxing way. One buys a refreshment, sits or lays back in big, soft chairs, and is tended by a pretty young girl who smiles and laughs as she talks back and forth with the other girls in the room ( usually this is a group activity – so far I have gone in groups of three and four).

After committing the foolish faux-pas of inviting myself along to a foot-massage with the company owner, I found myself staring at the inviting face of Ying Ying who I simply could not take my eyes off of. She frequently caught me staring at her, smiled and laughed, and conversation ensued with her making comments in Chinese which I could not, of course, understand in the least. Compliments and expression of interest were passed back and forth through the intermediary of the company owner ( himself Chinese ) and this resulted—to my absolute surprise—with me walking away with Ying Ying’s telephone number.

The following week, after getting another foot massage from Ying Ying ( after only, with some difficulty, securing an appointment, since I had no idea where she worked ) a date was arranged for Ying Ying and I to hike up a local mountain the following morning. This has led, since then, to three dates, with us trying to communicate with pads of paper, dictionaries, and sheer persistence.

We have played go (in Chinese pinyin Wéiqí) , she has tried to teach me some yoga-like positions (which resulted in incapacitating giggles from her as my pendulous abdomen swung unglamorously around); On one outing we navigated a seemingly endless obstacle course of street-vendors that had carpeted the sidewalk so thoroughly that we often had to walk in the street, ending up in the local Chinese bookstore where I bought an English-Chinese dictionary and she an introductory text on conversational English.

My interest in her, I am sure, is obvious to all who see us walk by. Her interest in me is perhaps no less surprising to many. Westerners are rare here, and we attract more than a few stares. On more than one occasion I have found myself looking at an attractive Chinese woman and found her staring back at me with frank interest. (And let’s be clear about this—as a middle-aged, overweight man who rarely draws such interesting looks from young attractive women back home, I know the difference between being a curiosity and being a target of interest.) China and the Chinese are comparatively poor, even in this upscale-moving, growing metropolis. They say there are fifteen-thousand factories between here and the next big city up the delta, and the life of people here is not lavish as they walk daily from company supplied apartments to company supplied meals to work in rough, dirty factories, and back again.

Any westerner here is recognized as one who is comparatively wealthy, and so we, perhaps, are seen as a way up and out of a challenging existence. Chinese all want to learn English, seeing it as a ticket to a better life. Both of these make the westerners here attractive to the local young women who have come here seeking office work. (The local town is named ChangAn and is somewhat clerical and upscale for the region, catering to the management of the various local companies.)

And so, I suspect that the 21-years young, lithesome Ying Ying is far more interested in the pragmatic and financial aspects of my personality than in my winsome smile. We have been circling each other like an unstable, binary star-system, unable yet to determine if we will fuse and produce a greater light or speed off in opposite directions.

Tonight is Monday, May 5th and I won’t seen Ying Ying again (at the earliest) until Saturday.

I leave next Monday, the 12th.

China and The Company Man - why nobody eats alone in China.

The first thing you must understand that China is a cooperative society—everyone works together and nothing is done alone. Like all broad statements, there are no doubt exceptions but that is the rule. You see this in how the Chinese drive—road signs and traffic flows are followed most of the time but you see vanishingly few police here. Pedestrians will walk in the street, cross wherever they want, and expect cars to slow and stop to avoid them—and they do. Full-sized 3-wheeled bicycles are still used and ride the wrong way down one-way streets as a matter of course if that’s the fastest or easiest way for the rider to get where they need to go.

Cars turn into traffic, do U-turns on busy streets, you will see small children led by the hand crossing in the middle of heavy traffic—this is not reckless endangerment, this is China. Driving is not at breakneck speeds because the traffic is heavy and the driver must constantly move around obstacles. When a driver honks his horn it is not to say “hey you stupid idiot” but rather “watch out, I’m right behind you.”

The cars one sees are invariably either minivans or sedans, gleaming and new, mostly Toyotas and Kias, but you also see the occasion BWM, Honda, or even Pontiac. Their sparkling appearance are in contrast to the grimy apartment complexes which are all streaked and stained with soot from the local industry.

* * *

While I am here, I stay in a 4-bedroom, company-owned apartment, currently housing myself, two permanent local employees (Jeff and Gino) and another traveler from San Diego, Steve. Each morning at 7:30 AM Steve, myself, and Jeff are picked up by a company vehicle and driven perhaps 3 miles to the local office. We then have a company breakfast with the company managers. The breakfast foods are distinctly different from in the U.S. Sometimes bread but as often not. Eggs in one form or another. Maybe a kind of rice, maybe some noodles. Some dumplings, plain or stuffed with something light. Little or no meat is seen at breakfast. All of the food is on a lazy susan and is in place before we arrive.

The bulk of the workers live in the dorms in a building next to the office, both of which are four-story long rectangles set with pale blue tiles. They have a company-made meal first thing also, but in a separate room. In China, there is a clear separation between management and workers. Workers are given room and board as part of their pay, though as one of the “managers” I have never eaten dinner here, just breakfast and lunch. After lunch (usually consumed between noon and 12:30) all of the workers can head off for their midday nap, not to return until just before 1:30. Steve and I always head back into the office and work ( I have typically taken the time to surf the internet.)

At the end of the day we all go out to dinner, again, typically driven in a company vehicle by a company driver ( it’s a minivan, clean and new) who typically has some western popular music playing. It is a bit disorienting to be driven around Dongguan province past the profusion of Chinese shops emblazoned with dense ideographic scripts listening to Nirvana and Percy Sledge.

When we go out to dinner it is again in a group, most often 6 or 8 or more around a big round table set with more food than a dozen people could safely eat. Last night, I thought the pattern would be broken and it would just be Steve and Jeff and Myself. We went to a Korean restaurant just around the corner from our apartment complex. But several of the female managers came, one brought her husband, two brought their babies ( one a five-month little boy and the other an 18 month old little girl. ) and then our boss (Sin) and the local company manager (Simon) both showed up and we ended up with 11 adults and two children and a table crammed with small dishes of dumplings, vegetables, meats, cups of tea, and small glasses to be filled with beer and which you are required to drain completely when another raises his glass to you and says “kanpai.”

Then perhaps it is off to a foot massage or to the "Hollywood Baby" where Simon has a bottle of Jack Daniels (literally) with his name on it. Last night I was tired so I went home early to try to get some sleep, but Steve and Simon went over to work on their bottle ( it's the third one they have bought since I've been here--but they do share with others).

I have been working with Jeff on the inventory system I am writing for Sin but he is apparently going to be away early next week while Simon and Jeff are away in Hong Kong at a convention. All of the evidence suggests that I will need to stay another week to get everything done.

We are the Aliens - Blogging in China

Is not easy. I haven't been able to actually view my blog itself (or anyone else's blog for that matter). I have a few minutes while most of the rest of the company is taking their after-lunch nap.

The flight was long but uneventful. The weather upon arrival in Hong Kong was rainy and we took a stomach-lurching hydrofoil ride from Hong Kong to Shenzhen where we picked out our luggage from large shipping containers that were hoisted by crane to the dock in front of us. We then filled out some perfunctory paperwork and handed them first to a very bored young clerk and then to a stern uniformed customs officer who eventually stamped our passports and we were on our way.

One genuinely fun and different experience is being the one who stands out--in the local Wal-Mart we often got stares and interested looks from people in the crowds because we were the aliens.

But I have this strange habit of convincing myself, wherever I go, that nothing is much different. And there are so many things about ChangAn that aren't all that different from Tel Aviv or any decent-sized city. There's traffic, grimy apartment buildings, busy pedestrians, couples with children...

Of course there are differences. But more on that when I have more time.

All of this is very difficult to believe.

I’m reminded of descriptions of the survivors of Hiroshima wandering around aimlessly because the devastation was so complete.

Our suffering doesn’t compare, of course. Few have lost their lives, although many have lost their homes and each day the tally grows.

The mind rebels, insisting “this will all be over soon, right?” “I mean, a whole city of millions of people can’t be held hostage by dumb fire, right?”

And brown smoke hangs in the air, stains the horizon, dusts cars with fine ash, turns the sun into a glimmering orange ball. The air is tan-colored, like dirty sheets. The perspective of the sky is lost, turns oppressive, flat.

Does everyone else have this same weird incongruous worry? About their jobs? About the projects they left behind and can’t be working on right now and will, of course my boss will understand that I couldn’t go to work—they want everyone to remain off of the freeways.

Of course they can’t be expecting me to go to work! Still, I worry.

Probably because I am one of the lucky ones not in the path of any of the fires. My primary concern is killing time and finding a place to camp out because the house I live in doesn’t have air conditioning.

My mind runs to weird plot scenarios. I just saw a very good Hollywood thriller and perhaps I am primed for drama. Fire moves towards a shelter where thousands have taken refuge. The Red Cross decides to hand out masks and remain indoors. Local fire crews make protecting the shelter a priority. The tension builds with thousands of lives in the balance.

I’m not writing this drama. Except for that last sentence it’s part of a recent news report.

But thousands of people don’t die in natural disasters in the United States. We just won’t allow it. It would make a better drama if there was some real risk of grave danger for the thousands of displaced persons scattered across the county map.

But we aren’t writing this drama. No one is. And that is terrifying because then anything can happen.

PG13 and The Philosophical Waiter—UNMASKED!

The Grey Witch is Gone. Maestro leaves the Stage. Edward takes up the baton. And other tales from the front lines of not-fine dining.

A few weeks ago something happened with the Grey Witch—nobody knows exactly what (and those who know aren’t telling). But the area manager was at the restaurant and so was the Grey Witch and it wasn’t her night to work. She left and we were given the word that she no longer worked at PG13 and the (reliable rumor) was that she wasn’t even allowed on the premises. Harley had told me that it was nearly impossible to fire a manager and technically she wasn’t—she put in her notice and then they let her go that day.

NOT A STORYBOOK TALE

The Grey Witch, AKA Lady Greymane, was not Cinderella. She lived in a trailer which was often parked in the lot at PG13. Her husband (according to reliable rumours) was a derelict drug-user who often hung around PG13 like a lost dog. Dressed like a homeless beach bum, he was genial, not loud, but definitely not the first person you invite over for dinner—more like someone you would struggle to get away from. No one knew why she didn’t.

Rumor has it that Lady Greymane suffered from Lupus. And so, while I am not sorry that she is no longer a manger at PG13, I am less disposed to criticize her grumpy laziness. What is that saying—to know all is to forgive all? It seems that the more informed and more decent we become as human beings the less we are able to indulge in the satisfaction of gloating over the suffering of the (supposedly) wicked. I’ll content myself to end this with an obscure quote from Schopenhauer. Obit anus, abit onus.

THE MAESTRO DEPARTS

Our area manager (I’ll call him Alessandro) was in the restaurant the day after our latest inspection. I saw Maestro sitting with him the same way Lady Greymane had the day she left. The next day we had our 360 meeting and it was announced, without additional information, that Maestro was gone and no longer employed by PG13.

Maestro had been the GM and also the man who hired and initially trained me. Now that he has left, there has been a complete management turnover, and a new, more professional staff has taken shape, which is all to the good. Still, Maestro had style. That doesn’t make up for poor management, and I know I will enjoy working at PG13 more now than before. But I liked him, and I will miss him.

A CHANGE OF BLOG POLICY

So what is PG13? And where is it? As many of my friends know, PG13 is a Denny’s restaurant on the corner of El Camino Real and Vista Way in Oceanside. Part of the reason I haven’t been updating my blog is the challenge of coming up with new aliases for people I want to write about. And part of it is a personal discomfort with wearing the cumbersome cloak of anonymity.

Now that Maestro and Lady Greymane are gone, I feel that I might end up staying longer as a waiter at Denny’s and at this Denny’s. I keep getting better and better at my job and enjoying it more. And I have some hope that the major irritants that I have been experiencing have a good chance of changing.

The number one problem cited in the software management readings I did during the dark-ages of my computer programming career was failing to get rid of problem employees. Any company that doesn’t do that can’t maintain the loyalty of those who work best at their jobs. When Alessandro (that’s an alias, but let me get used to this slowly, OK?) recently gave us a whole lot of talk about wanting to make the restaurant successful, I frankly didn’t believe it was anything more than talk. Now that he has done the hard things he really needed to do—removing two ineffective (at best) managers and installing competent and personable replacements—I have reason to think that results and hard work can matter.

So I will be dropping the aliases for the various individuals, or not, as it seems appropriate. I plan to use only first names, and I will respect the customers’ privacy and avoid mentioning personal details that could be used to identify them. Not that there is all that much to tell, but it only seems fair to the people who walk into the restaurant expecting to be served food—and not to become bit-players in this true-to-life blogdrama.

Now that I’ve said all that, come on down! The food at PG13 is exceptionally low-priced and can be surprisingly good. I provide professional service, and (time permitting) engaging and humorous conversation as well as recitations of poetry and song at your request. I work afternoons and evenings Wednesday through Sunday.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL WAITER UNMASKED

Yes, the author of this blog is none other than Timothy Badonsky. A former computer programmer who turned his back on a 20-year professional career as a computer programmer (and sometime database administrator) to write during the day and wait tables at night.

EDWARD TAKES UP THE BATON

Edward (that’s his real name), our new general manager, is an attractively avuncular man, and easy to work with. A few days ago the restaurant got very busy and we only had two servers on the floor. At the end of the night, Edward (I can’t shorten his name because we have another manager we call Ed!) shook my hand and passed on a compliment from a couple that I had waited on who said I had given them excellent service under very difficult circumstances. He then took our meals and comped them with a thank-you for doing such a good job.

Previously, under Lady Greymane or Maestro, as likely as not we would have been criticised for being slow or making mistakes. This was the first time I had gotten this kind of substantial positive feedback since Harley had left.

BABIES EVERYWHERE

I am currently renting a room in a house in Oceanside where one of my roommates has just given birth. Previously, I had lived with Harley and his wife-to-be and newborn. And there is a waitress at PG13 who is 5-and-a-half months pregnant. This is all very new to me. None of my siblings had children and I was never all that close to my cousins who did and so all of this baby stuff is oddly novel to me. Of course it is the most natural thing in the world. I just didn’t expect to ever know what a “diaper-genie” was.

CLOCKING OUT

Last night I forgot to clock-out at the end of my shift. Which is a problem because the system automatically shuts down after any employee is on for five hours without a break. This is really bad because I have no social life to speak of and mostly keep my cell phone turned off. So, I didn’t find out about this until about 9:30 this morning.

I can only assume that the PIC managed to call someone in the hierarchy to get the authority to kick me off of the system.

Oh well. We all make mistakes. My bad.

GOING FORWARD

I will continue to use “PG13” to reference the particular Denny’s I work at—both because it describes a particular Denny’s and it’s easier to type PG13 than “D-e-n-n-y” apostrophe ”s”. I expect to begin to use first names for the mangers and the other employees as they come up, and by so doing I will choose to limit what I write about them. If someone is having some personal issue that I hear about that really doesn’t have anything to do with the restaurant, I will either exclude it entirely or take steps to obfuscate the information.

Plus, I intend to incorporate the details of my philosophical efforts into coming posts. I am the philosophical waiter, after all.

Tim (AKA The Philosophical Waiter)

A New Year Brings Many Changes

I have been living with Harley along with his wife-to-be and baby son (hereinafter Harley Jr.) for a little over a month now. Harley has given me an education in restauranteering and many fascinating details of the behind-the-scenes goings on at PG13.

Harley has stepped-up from being a manger at PG13 to being an MIT (manager-in-training) at a casual dining restaurant chain I will call PMFYF (pseudo-Mexican food for young folk).

It has been a challenging month. While moving I fell off the truck--really spectacular falls, the kind that would have made America's Funniest Home Videos if there had been a video camera. While helping me move in, Harley saw me walk backward off the truck and had to take a minute to quit laughing. Then he said "No more walking backward for you!" Being a good egg, he made sure I didn't repeat the same mistake. (All my falls came from trying to carry and walk backward and talk at the same time--thank god I wasn't trying to chew gum too!)

So during the busiest period of the year I have been limping around like a 70-year old with arthritis. I know this because one came into PG13 and outpaced me getting to his table. Oh how the mighty have fallen!

Finally I went to the doctor after being practically being unable to walk and she diagnosed the problem, gave me some exercises, and explained that I had irritated my sciatic nerve and I needed to take a stronger anti-inflammatory medication than ibuprofen. Within a couple days I was much better and after a week I was beginning to get back to my old self again.

Which is excellent timing because a couple waitresses have moved on and Maestro (the GM) asked me to work an additional day every week. Yes! I've been needing to get back that day for several months now. Now I work Wednesday through Sunday 4-10 PM.

HARLEY GIVES ME THE LOWDOWN ON THE RESTAURANT INDUSTRY

Harley is a bright young guy (late 20's) who has worked in restaurants practically his entire adult life and has made them his career. PG13 offered him his own restaurant to stay with the company but he turned them down to go over to PMFYF. He explained to me that the restaurant industry (those places where you sit down and eat--everything above fast-food) essentially breaks down into three categories: Diners (IHOP, Denny's, COCOs, etc.), Casual Dining (T.G. I. Fridays, Chili's, Red Robin, Applebees, etc.), and Fine Dining (Ruth's Criss Stake house and four-star restaurants). Some attempt, with some success, to straddle the Casual and Fine dining border (Macaroni grill, P.F. Chang's) which is where I expect to apply next.

BEHIND THE SCENES AT PG13

Harley has given me practically X-ray vision into the goings-on at PG13. Events that were previously mysterious are now clear. But readers will have to wait for my next posting to catch more details of that and the babbling developments of Harley Jr. and co.

WHY THE LONG PAUSE?

I'm going to post perhaps once every week now and see how that goes. When I started I thought I needed to post every day and that was exhausting. I was very pleasantly surprised at the number of people (way more than two!) that enjoyed reading and urged me to continue. Thank you and Tip generously!