Many in an office dream of working at a coffee shop. They know what an office is like. They know the corporate world… but what about a little espresso making brick and mortar?
The office. Well. It’s too cold…or too hot. There are lots of sharp corners. Glass windows offer the only true transparency in the corporate world.
You don’t do good work. You have to supercharge something. And instead of asking if something has meaning or how it makes you feel, you repeat, “What’s the ROI What’s the ROI What’s the ROI?” until someone’s impressed. Your wrists are sore from typing. Your back, sore from sitting. And the weather outside doesn’t matter. It only matters that it is a Tuesday and the next meeting is in 12 minutes. Just long enough for you to fill your water bottle up and relieve yourself.
Everyone is late to the meeting. So you find yourself wondering, yet again, what is it like working at a coffee shop?
Well, I worked at a coffee shop. So I’ll tell you.
If you were part of the beginning of a coffee shop which is a lucky place to be, you cut your fingers on the rolled steel you carry in to make the countertops. You stain your good cardigan with the paint on the wall. You went with a muted blue, and you’re still not sure about it…but it’s all over the fucking wall now. So you call it quaint and move on.
If you care about doing good work and not just the pay check that is essentially nil (so I hope you care about the work itself), you learn that coffee is a science. At the very least, you learn it’s a craft. You learn all coffee is burnt and when a customer says “Starbucks coffee is so bad, they always burn it,” you know they don’t know anything about coffee. They’re drinking marinated ROASTED coffee bean water for Christ’s sake. Of course it tastes burnt.
You learn what it means to agitate coffee grounds and what a good extraction is. You learn to find sweetness in bitter things. What may taste like dirt water to some, might taste like sweet berries to another. You learn people are different. What beverage one culture might think sends you to hell also is the saving grace for a mother or student or doctor. It’s a strange contrast, but who thought white cream would go well with black bean water? It doesn’t matter. They were right. You may like your coffee black, but lattes are miracles.
You learn to know the temperature of milk in the tin pitcher by the touch of your hand. Your fingertips start to smell like freshly ground coffee. And the first months it smells good. After that, it doesn’t smell good or bad, but it makes your fingers buzz. And when the fingerprints on the tips of your fingers start to vibrate, you know that you smell like a morning off to a good start to the customers on the other side.
You learn the customers, not only by drink, but by name. You used to think you were “bad with names” but when you see how someone who thought they weren’t worth remembering lights up when you greet them by dropping their name casually, you call yourself on that bullshit. You weren’t bad with names. You didn’t care enough to try, and society had given you an out with a common “bad with names” trope everyone decided to believe in instead of decide to care enough to remember Ben.
You learn names. Drink orders. Tendencies. And those names and drink orders and tendencies bring their friends, their significant others, their children, and you learn those too. You steam the milk at a lower temperature for the little ones.
You spend a significant amount of time doing dishes, straining almonds for milk, wiping steam wands down, breaking down the machine. Not all customers are worth remembering too, but you remember them all the same. The cunt who called you a bitch when her latte wasn’t bubbly enough (that’s a cappuccino ma’am) is named Helen. And you’ll take pride in pouring her a latte art just as pretty as you do for Ben waiting behind her who always orders and receives his drink with kindness.
You meet a plethora of people who do not return, but leave an impression on you anyway. Maybe they share a secret. Maybe the tell you about a dream. Maybe they tell you that when they saw you for the first time, it felt like the sun was rising. And you decide to take that compliment to the grave.
There are fights with landlords. There are cheap dinners. Your apartment may be a basement with no windows and your bed is next to the sewer pipe. They’re sacrifices that don’t quite translate into real life yet, and that’s okay. It’s actually preferred. You see the folk on the other side in collared shirts and bloodshot eyes. They give you an eye roll, or a tired sigh, or a nervous and strained laugh because it’s Monday again, or Happy Tuesday, or HumpDay Wednesday, or OMG-Is-It-Thursday?-I-Thought-It-Was-Friday-Dammit, or TGIF. tldr; it’s not the weekend.
That’s a taste of what it would be like.
On one side of the counter, you wear an apron. On the other, a tie. On both sides, you wonder what it’s like on the other.
Today, in a world filled with everything promised to be at my finger tips, you know what I miss? Those trembling coffee-dusted fingers that are not “at my fingertips” but 10 years away into the past where I made Ben’s day just by saying his name Monday through Friday.
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