spoiled chinese girl

Tomorrow’s the company office putluck for Valentines day.  Honestly I don’t see why we need a potluck for Valentines but the HR person suggested it and so why not.  They’re trying to get the company more friendly with one another, while harping on us if we talk too much.  I just don’t get it.  Either ease up on us and let us chit-chat just a wee bit when we’re working, or don’t.  Don’t tease us by having these things where we can hang out and talk, but only every 6 weeks or so.

Anyways, the potlucks are getting funnier and funnier.  The first my friend Lizzie brought chips and dip.  Keep in mind she *JUST* moved into a new house with her hubby and we’re speculating she didn’t have a kitchen. And she brought in a lot of stuff.  Some really great varieties of chips, tortias and lots of dip and salsa.  Well Amanda is all about fairness and complained about chips and dip not being “real food” (whatever) and ever since our last potluck and this coming potluck the rule has been “No bringing chips and dip” which Liz takes offense to since she did that the first time around.  And it wasn’t like it was bad.

The comment on that is “we need to make sure there’s enough food for the 20 or so office people” and if I recall correctly, it’s not like we ever ran out of food.  We’ve always had leftovers and extras and food we end up sending to the warehouse lunch room for them to all munch on. (I hope they’re not offended by us giving them our leftovers!)

But this most recent one is hilarious.  The e-mail told us that there must be like one green salad, one fruit salad, three meat dishes, two fish/shrimp dishes, one casserole, two vegitarian dishes, one rice dish, one pasta dish, three desserts…  We in the lunch room have been laughing our heads off as we sign up for stuff, and talk about who’s going to duke it out with who if two of the sign-up things were “too close” to each other.

Even better is my other coworker & friend Donna said in passing how she might bring pizza again (Last time she ordered two pretty big pizzas, one veggie one meat and they were awesome) and if I heard this story properly, the HR lady said “No pizza, it’s not on the list”

Revenge of the Human Resources I do think I hear!

Anyways, no one said I couldn’t bring cucumber sanwiches, and I figured it would be easy, cute and silly.  I just realized I only have a few hours to make all of them now too!  Away I go!

Never send a white girl to do a Chinese girl’s job.

This girl at work decided on Thursday since we were going to have a week off (not our choice, and also with very little warning so it wasn’t like we could plan anything last minute, freaking jerks.) we should order in lunch on Friday for a bunch of us and saw what each person wanted.  The options were pizza, chinese food and swiss chalet.

Seeing as how on Wednesday we all had large servings of Pizza during the second potluck of the month, I opted for Swiss Chalet since I didn’t really have any interest in chinese food.  Of course it seems the majoriy of the people picked chinese as their first option.  I went with it since why the hell not… it’s a company “girl bonding” thing.

So we were all picking dishes we wanted to get to share and the girl ordered from some place.  The food shows up and as I’m walking into the lunch room I hear her going on the phone to the company saying how the portions are way too small and how it was too expensive and she’s never going to order from there again.  I don’t know about you, but when I worked retail, complaints like that meant nothing.  The woman even said “This was your first time ordering with us” as a retort to the “I’m never ordering from you again” and while the food was very obviously overpriced, I don’t know, I didn’t see it as being that bad.

I also found out that not everyone in the office was invited to partake in this lunch which I thought was rude since well… there’s other people that are in the lunch room as well and suddenly they’re eating their brought-from-home food while we’re all pigging out on this nonexistant chinese food.

Side story:
One of the chinese girls came into the room when a large number of us were in there, and said in Cantonese to the other chinese girls in the office (but not me) “Oh… there’s no room for me to sit down” and just out of habit in that I understood every word she said, I immediately replied (in English) with “Hey, there’s a chair under this bag.”  And had EVERYONE in the office stare at me.  One other girl said “So… she understands Cantonese?”  And the first girl who talked was like “If she replied to me… I’m going to say yes.”  It was funny. So they start talking to me in Cantonese asking me how all this chinese food came about and what we paid for it and all that jazz, I’m guessing so the non-chinese people who took part wouldn’t know what if anything we were talking about, although I replied in English anyways so I’m sure you could figure it out.

She said the same thing in Chinese to the other Chinese girls as I said to the non-chinese people.  “Leave it to a white girl to order chinese food and this is what happens.” is what I said.  The chinese girl said “See the white people went and ordered Chinese food without asking us Chinese people where would be good to order from!”

I think the whole thing was silly.  I was full and had about a plate and a half full, there was lots of food for the people who ordered.  It wasn’t a stuff-yourself-silly type of lunch and it was expensive for what it was… but really.

I think the most amusing was the girl who did the ordering, I mentioned “Wow, so I’ve finally eaten chicken balls” and she’s like “You’re Chinese and you’ve never ha d chicken balls??”  To me and everyone else’s reply of being “BECAUSE I’m Chinese is why I’ve never had chicken balls! That’s a dish invented by Americans and somehow given a Chinese name.”  It was HILARIOUS.

Ignorance is bliss I suppose.

So my work is having another pot-luck lunch tomorrow, and it’s also the kris-kringle, secret santa, gift exchange deal.  Anyways, we had a max limit of $20.00, and I ended up getting the person who I know the least, who really doesn’t socialize or ANYTHING with ANYONE so I didn’t know what to get him.  Actually I first got some girl who I didn’t know at the time but got to know quite well in the past few weeks, but traded with the girl I sit beside because she didn’t want to get the computer programmer guy and I didn’t really know anyone at the time.

Either way, I only spent like 7 bucks on my gift for him which sounds cheap and cheesy but really, I know he’s a “Brown guy” (so like, Middle-Eastern somewhere) and they have all sorts of dietary restrictions so the easy way out of “Chocolates” didn’t work.  He ended up with a tube of caramel popcorn.

Onto the pot-luck.  I cheaped out and did the same thing I made last time, pasta salad, just with different veggies this time.  And I was wondering why my pot of water wasn’t boiling fast enough, and finally realized it was because I had set the heat to medium.  Oops.  This time it took longer because of that.  I also sort of blanched my veggies by throwing them into the pasta & water for the last 30 seconds to cook before I drained and cooled everything off. I think it worked out better.

Again, I made twice as much, but this time for a good cause.  I have another pot-luck to go to on Thursday for Unicycle club and the Christmas party, and I’m bringing the remains there.  See, I’m a thinker.

I think I had both days scheduled as Lazy Sundays.  I know that the week before I had talked to my friend Phil about going down to St.Kitts, Niagara Falls in an attempt to go across the border into the US and buy a carton of ciggerettes, then smuggle them back into Canada without paying the duty costs.  I think we would have succeeded but he wasn’t too sure.  We also didn’t know if we were really going, even though I had slated to grab the car.

Well I’m pretty sure Friday night I started to read Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan.  Only I passed out after the third page, while in bed, at about 8pm because I become so freaking dead tired at the end of the week.  And I woke up at around 1am unable to sleep.  I bummed around online, read the book some, was shocked at the fact I could fall asleep 3 pages in, and just made myself tired by about 5am which is generally when I wake up, so I fell asleep listening to the radio that’s supposed to be my alarm.  Woke up again probably around 9am and just felt normal.  Did laundry, the sort of weekend-things most people do.  Stayed in my jammies basically all day.

Sunday I woke up early, watched a bit of Coronation street, while I am still interested in the show it’s not a must-see-TV type of series for me anymore, I think all the cute boys I was infatuated with have gone which makes it just not so interesting.   Called up Phil and asked if he still wanted to head to the border for our secret mission.

Picked up Phil around 2pm and started heading down to St. Kitts.  Found out our friend Marty no longer resides in St.Kitts so we overshot and went straight to the strip in Niagara Falls.  Hung out in his new diggs and chatted, hung out, I went on a mission to find pants that fit me, considering I threw out all my “fat pants” at the beginning of the year, am now required to re-purchase them all.  After 2 failed stores finally was able to find something at the Roots outlet store, 50 bucks for both pairs taxes in, which ain’t too shabby.  Went to a bar to meet Marty’s dad and got a free coke out of it, I was driving so no alcohol for me, drove around in circles looking for sushi places and finally ended up back at the same bar for pizza and wings.  Nabbed a copy of a movie, and drove home, and was home before my parents got back from the Casino.

So maybe my weekend wasn’t THAT uneventful.

Just makes me realize I need to visit my friends more often to make it something worth writing about.

So it was my birthday last Tuesday, making me almost one week late for the post that I’m making, but it’s 51 weeks until I hit a quarter century. Crazy thoughts.

The birthday was low-key, not many people knew about it and fewer people cared. I traditionally hide away from the IAM/BME community by having my IAM page expire and I sit away for as long as possible whilst an account I’d pre-purchased to expire 6 months from the 5th tick away until I can no longer take it. This year it took less than 24 hours as I was back online fairly quickly.

However I avoided any and all “Happy Birthday” greetings through hiding the fact that its my birthday from the group. I’m pleased, as it always sort of irritated me, in that whole “Geez, go outside and do something” type of thing. I know people are just being friendly but that’s not my idea of friendly I suppose.

I was also invited out for dinner. The people I used to hang out with for most of my Ryerson GCM career we went out for Pizza Hut, which was a definate strange choice since we usually do something much more “Chinese” but they suggested it, and I wasn’t going to complain.

I got there early, and since getting there early, decided to go into the used cd/video store. Bought Season 7 of the Simpsons (which starts off with part two of who shot mr. burns… meaning I now need go get season 6 so I can comfortably watch part 1 as well.) and looked into getting a part time job there. It’d be interesting.

Did the pizza thing, and took home some pasta. The guys were great and got me a stack of cash for my day. (Generally we get gift cards whenever we know someone wants something, like a digital camera or a playstation… but since my general interests usually include unicycles, and drum kits, they thought it be wisest to just give me cash and let me figure out where to go shopping instead) which was uber-sweet.

That’s about it really I think. Also got a stack of cash from my parents. Both of which basically got put towards the phone bill that I racked up on the cell. Although in my wheelings and dealings to get a much better cell phone plan off the company, I scored myself a dark blue Motorola V3 RAZR… so it’s sort of like my present to myself I guess. It’s complicated to figure out.

Also on Thursday, my friend Alex got me the video game Guitar Hero for PS2.

I now need to purchase a PS2.