Let’s play Coffeeshop Bingo

Hey everyone! Here’s a fun game you can all play at your local coffee emporium (although I use the word “fun” in the loosest possible way). The rules are simple; take my scorecard from bellow, head to your local Starbucks/Costa/Nero/Coffee Republic/other soulless multinational coffee Reich, buy a coffee, sit down and spend some quality time gawking at people like a potential sex offender. Every time you see one of these coffee shop sights score some points. There are even potential bonuses. Yay!

Mental, middle aged divorcée
Score: 30 points
She comes in at the break of dawn everyday and smiles as if her life isn’t a worthless series of lonely moments. Always is talking about how she’s going to bring in her kids sometime for some family time. She’s been saying it for the past seven years. The kids have never come in.
Score 10 Bonus points: Out of the corner of her eye you catch a single rolling tear as she has the brief realization that she is dying alone.

Cuntish, Student Toffs
Score: 10 points
Posh, rich, trust-fund motherfuckers that sit in large groups scoffing obnoxiously at everyone around them and sniffing their own collective, self satisfied farts. All of them are intolerable cunts.
Score 10 bonus points: One of them mentions something that “daddy” has just brought them.

Constantly Buzzing Accountant
Score: 20 points
Wired on a diet consisting of sixteen double espressos and a blueberry yogurt, this guy sits at his laptop furiously typing away at a small mountain of financial spreadsheets and business power-point presentations. Strenuously overworked because he had to fire his interns as a result of the recession, he’s just two clicks away from putting his first through his monitor. Ask him how his day is and his face will explode.
Score 10 Bonus points: He pulls out clumps of his hair every time his Blackberry goes off.

High-Vizz wearing, Neanderthal Bastard
Score: 10 points
Comes in with his St George’s Cross tattoo visibly showing, orders a coffee and makes a loud, laddish, Danny Dyeresque “witticism” about how in the good old days coffee was just coffee and you didn’t have all this continental, cappuccino nonsense.
Score 10 Bonus points: The middle class barista serving him has donned an embarrassing and patronizing Mockney accent and is asking, “Did you catch the footie at the weekend?” as if they are soul buddies. Neanderthal Bastard hates this.

Anti-establishment Rocker
Score 20 points
Still has dreadlocks, wears Che Guevara T-shirts and listens to Rage Against the Machine for their political insights at the age of 32. Sits in a corporate coffee shop, drinks Lattes and carries a Macbook. Spends all afternoon writing angsty, left wing, anti-corporate poetry while sitting in a Starbucks. Doesn’t get the irony.

Laptop Hemingway Prick
Score 30 points
Sits with his laptop on display for the whole world, so that everyone can see his is working on his Magnum Opus. When asked how his day is he will go into a long tirade about how he can’t get the third act of his novel to tie together. Will then go on to tell you the plot of his novel for the sixteenth time in painstaking detail. 100% self involved. Doesn’t realise anyone else exists.
Score 10 bonus points: Laptop Hemingway is complaining of writers block yet again.

Confused Asians
Score 10 points
Large groups of Japanese tourists all gazing at the pricing board, utterly dumbfounded by the massive amount of options with no idea what any of them are. Will take a stab in the dark at ordering something and then look visibly disappointing when presented with their drink as it is clearly not what they thought they were getting.
Score 10 Bonus points: If they are pulling peace signs as they pose for pictures.

Fascist Espresso Mussolini
Score 40 points
Old Italian tourist that has ridiculously high standards for his double espressos. Will return two or three to the bar complaining that they are too weak/strong/bitter/flavourless.
Score 10 bonus points: Espresso Mussolini is accompanied by painfully beautiful daughter that is distracting the barista from making her fathers espresso.

Batty Old Ladies
Score 10 points
Two batty old women that look like they’ve just come off the set of Coronation Street. Sit with a cup of tea and babble endlessly to each other about the weather or a relatives wedding . Scared of foreigners.
Score 10 bonus points: Batty old ladies mention how cold it is outside to the strangers sitting next to them as if they are proclaiming some previously unrevealed secret.

Depressed, Semi Competent Employee
Score 10 points
Has the glazed look of a man sucked of his soul, repetitively serving coffee after coffee in an endless cycle of self pity. Forced to smile at customers by his manager who he hates. Has the burden of cooperate weight bearing down on his shoulders at all time. Hates everyone. Probably blogs about it.
Score 10 bonus points: Semi Competent Employee has a look that suggests he wishes a plane would fly into the building and incinerate everyone in a raging fireball.

No one likes a smartass. Especially in the Espresso industry.

“Hello sir. How can I help you?” I ask.
“I’ve got one leg shorter than the other,” he replies and then chuckles to himself manically. I hang my head and sigh. This is going to be a long order.
“Can I get you anything to drink?” I readjust my question, trying to make it as direct as possible so as to avoid him interpreting it to fit his “comedy” style.
“Well I’m in a coffeeshop so I probably want a coffee. Not rocket science is it.” He laughs again and then nudges his wife, a plump woman with a shallow stare, who gives a small smile to her husband and then makes depressed eye contact with me suggesting the burke does it all the time.

Every now and again we get a comedian in. Someone who thinks that they are so uncontrollably funny that they have to project jokes loudly to everyone and anyone in a seven mile radius. Usually they are kids who think they’re being dreadfully clever without realising they are coming across as punchable bellends. Sadly this guy is a fully grown man in his fifties and really should know better.
“What coffee would you like?” I ask through gritted teeth. I can feel the enamel grinning away into dust.
“Two white coffees please. None of that foam. I want a coffee not a bubble bath,” he says still laughing to himself.
I make the coffees and then ask in my driest tone, “Anything to eat or anymore witticisms with that?”
He doesn’t pick up the loathing in my voice. “I see you have fat free muffins! Fat free?!” He looks up and around the store as if expecting everyone to be gazing at him, waiting for him to deliver his next punchline. “Well where does all the fat go? Is it sucked out and put on some muffin fat mountain somewhere!” His last sentence is barely comprehensible because it is almost drowned out by his now uncontrollably raucous laughter.
No one else is laughing.
The customers behind him stare with the sort of contempt that Haitians have for sudden earth movements .
He doesn’t have a clue.

It’s really sad when this happens. Mentally unstable old men with no sense of self awareness making absolute tits out of themselves in public, thinking they are Billy Connolly but actually coming across as an idiotic boob, a real life David Brent. I mean shit, if Chemical Ali is getting executed for gassing Kurds then this guy definitely needed to be hung for spouting such unfunny noxious fumes from his pie hole.

So here’s a protip for any of you wannabe stand-up comedians; before you start spreading your mirth to anyone and everyone, do an open mic night down your local and listen to the response your jokes get. If the only response you get from the room is of yawning, tumbleweeds and empty pint glasses being thrown at you, don’t come into public buildings and try out your routine on an undeserving coffee shop employee. Because one day you’ll do it when one of us are at breaking point and you’ll find your grinning face being smashed repeatedly on an espresso machine before having it jammed in the Panini toaster.
Bastards.

The Terrible, Terrible Cold

So Britain has been plagued by bad weather recently. A light dusting of snow and the whole country has ground to a stand still. This prompts people to feel they have to state the obvious at each and every opportunity. “Cold, isn’t it?” customers inform me on a day to day basis. “It’s been snowing again,” the more observant of them point out.

Really? Jeez, I didn’t notice. When I’m not operating this coffee machine I’m locked up in a cage with no outside contact, cut off from the world with only left over Panini’s and stale coffee as sustenance. Thanks for informing me. I’ll pass on the news to the other caged monkeys (To be fair, I probably shouldn’t make light of the cage idea. If the company found out that it saved them money we’d never be allowed to leave the store ever again).

But the cold doesn’t just bring out the bleeding obvious from people. It also fucks up each and every bit of engineering that keeps our country running. Yesterday, due to the subzero temperature – and the fact that our country is about as prepared for snowfall as Poland was for the Nazis – a pipe burst under the street that our store is situated on and the entire row of shops were without flowing water. This isn’t particularly bad if you’re selling designer dresses, like the store next to us, but it’s a royal pain in the ass for us. Our coffee machine died, we were unable to wash dishes and our toilets stopped working (right when I needed to take a giant dump). A coffeeshop with no coffee is as pointless an internet setting with parental control turned on.

However, much to my surprise, the general public didn’t take it out on me when I informed them of the situation. I expected them to moan and cry and rage and start flipping over tables in caffeine depleted madness. But they didn’t. They just slumped in a defeated humph. It was as if everyone had just become used to the cold fucking them over repeatedly and now just accepted it as if it were just an inevitable inconvenience. They could go home that night and be told that their first born son had been picked up in a blizzard and carried six hundred miles before being dumped in the north sea somewhere near Norway and they’d still have the same reaction. In the fight between the cold and the British, the cold was sadly going to defeat us and we just had to accept it.

But the most amazing thing about this was what happened when the pipe was fixed and our machine started working again. It had been out of order for about two hours and the shop was virtually empty. However as soon as the water came back on and the first person got served a steaming hot latte , the doors burst open and people scrambled in as quick as they would if Cheryl Cole announced she was opening her legs to the general public. It was as if they had all been camped outside waiting eagerly, salivating like fat, teenage, female Goths awaiting the premier of the new Twilight movie. As soon as they heard the Espresso running again their caffeine sense went into overdrive and they became as excited as a dog in heat. Soon we had a queue to the door and it was back to business.

“Cold outside, isn’t it?” An old lady said at the head of the queue.

I wish the water was always off.

How to Correctly Laugh at an Area Manager’s Joke

(and a few other things of minor importance)

Remember that episode of Friends when Monica gets annoyed at Chandler for laughing at his boss’s bad jokes? Of course you do! Thanks to E4, everyone has seen every episode of Friends enough times that the image of those six burkes dicking around in a fountain is ingrained into the back of our brain like a traumatic childhood incident, unable to be removed even with the most extensive counseling.

Well that situation is surprisingly true to life. Your boss makes a crap joke, you laugh. It’s the rules. Why do you think so many people in high positions are so painfully unfunny? Because there is no one under them to tell them that their jokes are shit. And the higher up the career ladder you go, the less people above you to tell them that your jokes are awful. Ever laughed when the Pope does his Christmas stand-up show? Of course not. There’s no one on earth that can warn the pope that his routine isn’t getting funny anytime soon. So he still rattles out the same skit about the imaginary dude in the sky, year after year, until it becomes so boring those in the audience, unable to effectively heckle him off stage, resort to diving at him and dragging him to the ground in a effort to get him to stop.

But what that episode of Friends doesn’t go in depth about is the manner in which you should laugh. Not every laugh is appropriate for every situation. For instance, today my Area Manager, the most senior member of the company that I am going to have to deal with, came in. We were busy so she came behind the bar and gave us a hand. After a few orders she messed up and, laughing loudly, said to me, “Looks like I should be in your position and you in mine.”

Now, this is barely a joke. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that it was the least entertaining thing I’d heard someone say without mentioning Belgium. However you’re forced to laugh at it.

But how?

You can’t go for an all out, belly laugh because it’d be inappropriate and you don’t know them that well. You can’t go for a small little, half assed snicker because then it wouldn’t seem as if it were funny enough. You can’t go for the ridiculing laugh that you use to laugh at someone because she’d think you were laughing at her. You can’t go for a nodding, i-see-what-you-did-there-laugh because even she’s aware enough to know there is nothing clever about this joke (she just doesn’t realize that there is nothing funny about it either).

So in the end I just ended up puffing out a series of artificial, subdued chuckles that sounded like I was mildly out of breath or had something stuck in my throat. She didn’t look entirely satisfied with this response, perhaps aware of the forced nature of my laugh. She didn’t make anymore jokes for the rest of the day. Maybe I did some damage to her self confidence and will force her to reevaluate how she interacts with people. Or maybe I’ll check the Rota for next week and find out that I’m working 12 hour shifts all week in the solitary store room. The latter is sadly more likely.

On another note, if you’re one of those teenage girls that’s into Flight of the Concords, Biffy Clyro and MGMT, who wears checkered shirts and Mighty Boosh t-shirts and thinks saying things like, “I like cheese,” is random and hilarious; STOP IT! No one likes you and that one that guy you fancy, your “artisan” friend that hangs out in your large, all female, group is only one trip to Brighton away from coming out of the closet.

And one more thing; your cup of coffee does not represent your personality and when you hear a slogan that says, “customize your cup to suit you!” don’t take it as a personal challenge. The more you try and individualize your coffee (skinny/soya milk, single/extra shot, decaf, extra hot, no/extra froth, pre-warmed cup, only coffee beans that have been picked by left handed people) the more we’re going to deliberately get it wrong.

One final note: I'm not entirely sure what fotolia stands for in the picture that accompanies this entry. All I can imagine is that it is a word that describes the atmosphere of shame and self loathing you feel when you try and stick your tongue up your superior's asshole.

New Years Day Madness

The Nightmare just doesn’t end.

After being assured News Years Day off two weeks ago by not one, but both of my managers I was gearing up for a nights celebration to welcome in the new decade. There was going to be wild abandonment, copious drinking and failed attempts to pick up strange women in bars.

However, the day before New Years Eve I was informed that because of staff shortages, caused by the company’s steadfast refusal to put anyone else on the pay roll, I’d actually have to work a 9 hour shift from 10am till 7pm on New Years Day.
After spending two days bitterly pissed off I decided to not let this interrupt my nights festivities and proceeded to do all the things I had lined up for myself and just deal with the aftereffects the next day. I abandoned with wildness, drank copiously and chatted to this girl who seemed interested for a while but texted me a happy new year from 40 miles away in another man’s bed. All was going to plan. I went to bed at around 5am, knowing I had to be up in about 4 hours to work but figured it was New Years Day and so no one would come in to get coffee. It would be nice and quiet.

It’s amazing that even though practically every other shop and store in town was shut people still flooded in, gawping at empty store windows, pressing on the doors lightly, unable to understand why it wouldn’t open or why the bright lights on the inside weren’t switched on. This mass closure confused them. They got irritated. They became angry. Then they came to bother me.

Now it’s important to remember that people who go to town on New Years Day and the people that are so stupid they’re not actually capable of completing the act of sleeping. They are so brain dead that sleeping is even too challenging for them. On the one day of the year when it’s perfectly acceptable to spend all day under the covers without fear of reprimand, they fuck it all up and resort to basic primitive instincts: buy coffee, complain loudly and pick flint from their belly buttons. Hundreds of them. We were busier on New Years Day than the build up to Christmas. It was disgusting.

There were two significant things happening in our store on 1/1/10. Firstly the VAT charges had gone up. Most of our items had risen by 5p. This not so complex economical situation perplexed many. The regulars, old biddies with their change of coppers all stacked in neat, precise little piles, politely waiting for their coffee were suddenly flabbergasted by the fact that it wasn’t the correct amount. Explaining the VAT change was like explaining family values to Joseph Fritzl. They just stood there, dumbfounded, unable to comprehend this simple fact. I may as well have been talking French while juggling starfish and wearing ladies underwear and a snorkel. They didn’t have a clue.

The second significant thing to change today was the fact that we closed early. Instead of 7.30pm we shut at 6pm. Many couldn’t understand this. “What? But I was going to come here and do some work on my laptop tonight! What am I going to do now?” One man protested. Shit, you could be using your laptop to surf the internet for a Thai Bride to smuggle heroin into Felixstowe for all I care, but you’re not doing it in here tonight. Go home, put the kettle on and do it there you braindead cretin. Another man even challenged us, saying a sign outside said we were open to 7.30 so therefore we were legally obliged to open for that long. Unfortunately he cranial abilities couldn’t compute the sign directly under the Regular Opening Hours sign which listed the Christmas Opening Hours sign. <

These poor omens on the first day of this new decade suggest that the next ten years will be no more progressive or uplifting than the last. It’ll still be inhabited by noisy assholes that would rather spend a day in a congested coffee shop, surrounded by other morons, all unable to understand things like Vat Charges, Christmas Opening Times or the concept of sleep. Bastards.