A delightful/funny lunch

My day didn't start all that well. I woke up this morning and the alarm clock read 8:40 am. After muttering a few curses, I rushed to brush my teeth. Then I realized that I had someone to come in at 9 for a job interview. My rush became a mad dash. To my own amazement, I made it to my office before 9 o'clock with a minute to spare.

The guy was already in the conference room, yet my boss was no where in sight. I called him up and he said he was still a good half hour away and asked that I would handle the interview. Arrghhh. The interview went well for me and for our new hire. And yes, we ended up hiring him on a trial basis. The rest of the morning I was training him on a few things. My boss kept emphasizing that I should not spoon-feed him so that we can gauge his skill sets. Ok... we'll see how that go. I am glad that we finally found someone to help out with projects. I've been supporting everyone by preparing nice graphs and cad drawings. It's time that I can move on to bigger and better things. Career-wise, I need to branch out and maybe get involved with different types of projects. Not that I don't enjoy doing flood studies (they are challenging at times), but it'll be nice to venture into some groundwater stuff and maybe some wastewater side of things so that I can apply what I picked up over the years in school.

Hmm... I am supposed to write about a delightful lunch. Yes... So the story goes... My coworker went out to lunch and promised to bring me back something from a new Filipino restaurant in town. She got back an hour later empty-handed. She said... "2 good news and 1 bad news." The first good news was that the food was really really good. The bad news was that you couldn't order carry-out without a 2 hour notice in advance. Huh? Another piece of good news was that she got cans of tuna stacked away in the kitchen cabinet and that I could help myself to those for lunch.

Since she was raving about the food so much, my boss and I decided to go try it ourselves. It was a buffet lunch. Got curry chicken, roast pork, sweet and sour tilapia, crispy rolls made with pork (I think), beef, fried rice, and stir-fried rice noodles. The food was surprisingly good, kinda have a home-made feel to it. Not greasy at all. If you want to order any dishes on the menu, you need to call in in advance, since according to the chef--in his exact word--he prepares everything from "raw," meaning from scratch.

The best part of the whole lunch was that after we were done eating, the chef came out and sat down and started yakking away. We talked about the Philippines, how beautiful it is, the early history of its settlement. We touched on global warming, bad food/bad customers, his business philosophy, .... the list goes on.

He is such a colorful person with a good sense of humor. We were talking about ignorance and intolerance of people and about America being a melting pot. Then he commented that unless your name is Racing Bull or Sitting Duck, you are really just a foreigner in this country. [That really cracked me up.]

He continued... "The blacks came here on the Amistad; the whites came here on the May Flower; I flew here on Northwest!" [Man, he should be on Comedy Central!]

Then he said that people told him that he came to the US and took the job away from the Americans. He would reply, "Are you a cook? Are you a nurse (he was a nurse by profession, but he loves to cook and therefore the restaurant)?... No... So I didn't take the job away from you." [I thought to myself--good argument!]

One thing he said which made my boss a little uneasy afterwards was that he has a theory about our immune system. If we aren't expose to the germs, we won't be immune from them. People use soap and wash their hands all the time... and the theory goes washing hands all the time is not necessary. [Ok he didn't say that in those exact words, but we thought he really meant it. He was a nurse for goodness sake.]

It's great that we have a little nice ethnic restaurant in an otherwise very vanilla (my boss' word, not mine) town. To me, it's always interesting to meet people from different culture and with different experience. In essence, this is what Life is meant to be lived. You live to experience the people, the nature, and all the things around you. [And don't forget God, if you believe He is among us and in us.]

So for once, my WORK infected soul seemed to be cured miraculously. I didn't really do any work today. After lunch, I was just talking to another coworker about the project we were supposed to be working on. All talk, no work. And before we knew it, it was 4:30. Time to go home.