The Morning Crowd

I can say, with all concrete honesty, that there is nothing on earth that is as bad as hearing your alarm going off at 5.30 in the morning, signaling that it is time to start your day. The incessant ringing that punishing your ear drums and beats your sleepy brain into submission. That’s when you know it’s time for work.

And working the early morning shift in a coffeeshop is stupendously awful. It's as if the company, or a vengeful god, has studiously tailored them to be the worst possible experience this side of waterboarding. We have to arrive at 6.15am to prep the shop. At that time, during these long winter months the place is cold, dark, depressing and those smells I used to love – the baking of fresh pastries, warm coffee – I now detest with a passion. They are the stimulus that sets in motion flashbacks of my ingrained psychological trauma, like shouting, “Surprise!” to a rape victim.

Then at 7.00am we open and the morning crowd enters. The morning crowd is a small group of people/oddballs, most of whom come in every single day and buy the same drinks, sit in the same places, read the same newspaper and hang their coats in the same way. In other words; they’re all obsessively compulsive freaks who really should be sterilized for being such a hopeless burden.

And because they are there every single day at a period when it is relatively quiet they think they can start talking to you and befriending you. This is because it is likely none of them have any other friends and have to converse with people who are trapped in the gallows of croissants and coffee, poor sods like me that are forced to listen to them. And their talk makes my morning - which already started pretty far downhill - start to tumble further down a painful, slippery slope before rolling off the edge of the craggy cliffs of despair and crashing crumpled in a depressed mess, impaled on the sharp rocks of their boring conversations. I just wish they would shut up. The morning is like awkward sex; no one enjoys it but talking during it is only going to make things worse.

But the main reason I have no respect for these people? It is because, at a time when it is perfectly valid and acceptable to lie in bed, sleeping peacefully and dreaming wistfully, pretending the real world doesn’t exist, they come in and sit for up to an hour before they go to work. A whole hour! Instead of sleeping like people with fully functioning cognitive ability, they sit with their black Americanos and stare at the same peeling paint work and look longingly off into the distance wishing their life had some meaning. I have no respect for people that voluntarily get out of bed early so that can sit in a shitty coffee shop and look depressed.

Anyway, I’m off to bed now. In a few short hours I'll be doing it all over again. ’Bon Nuit.