First, walking to work right outside of Bikram yoga/convenience store, saw cable car stopped, and brakeman leaning out asking a small, elderly Asian man if he needed an ambulance. Man and woman were huddled on the sidewalk with a 20-something blond (turns out British) woman who is on the phone with ambulance. She showed me her pad of paper with the license number and make/color of the car that hit hte man. He was wiping blood from the crown of his head down around his neck. Both were agitated (man and woman/wife) and didn’t speak English. I said some stuff like, do you speak chinese, are you chinese. They didn’t respond. They sounded southern asian, it was hard to tell. Finally another younger Asian person came up and he could translate from Mandarin to Cantonese. So it’s this daisy chain of british girl to me, me to this Asian guy, Asian guy to the couple. english-> mandarin -> cantonese. Motorcycle cop comes up and confirms, when I ask him, that he can bring a translator.
Read an article in SJ Merc times that finally the translation staff at hospitals will be stepped up. What I experienced in the NICU was awful. Parents having to wait more than a half an hour to get a Spanish (!) translator in to confirm dosages for their daughter, and during that time the infant daughter is lustily crying on the operating table waiting for food. Reflugio! That’s Spanish for reflux, the question of whether the kid needed reflux medicine.
The cop just needed to say “Ying yue?” I mean, how hard is it to ask if someone speaks your language? I could learn “do you speak mandarin” in cantonese, I guess.
Part II: boycott Norton’s Vault
Where I play trivia every week, Norton’s Vault, has a new low in management and bartender staff. Some guy who trips himself out as obnoxious and funny is just obnoxious. I come with a passel of people each week. Well, this week, I got a lecture from the bartender that “you girl” who “brings tons of people” and “doesn’t make reservations”… does he not want business? And, after making these comments, doesn’t listen to me respond. Well guess I’ll have to bring that passel to their competitor. I can’t understand why an SF bar would *not* want patrons, I mean, figure that out. And on the reservation topic- it’s an afterwork bar trivia contest, that has a long bar, that we stand at. Also friends are varying in their degrees of committedness, sometimes 2 people sometimes 8. It’s a bar. Whatever. Lame.