Choice

Ah choice. The freedom to choose. The freedom to be your own man (or woman). The freedom to dictate your own life on your own terms. The ability to make decisions that define you as a person. The luxury to customize the things around you to fit in with your lifestyle and your persona. The right to express yourself. The right to be an individual. The right to be you!

Above is a depressing, ham-fisted, but incredibly successful marketing plot aimed at striping you of your dignity and of your money.The illusion of personal assistance and luxury to sucker you into thinking you have power or options. “Customize your cup to suit you!”

Yes, personal customization now includes things as petty and redundant as your morning cup of coffee.
Want to show people that you are on a diet? Get a skinny latte (and then knock it back with a triple chocolate fudge cake that may as well be renamed Cholesterol on a Plate).
Want to show you enjoy coffee without gaining any of the benefits of coffee? Get decaf. (And on the subject of decaf; people that drink it are stupid. Are person that drink coffee for the taste rather than the caffeine is as retarded as a smack addict shooting up because he likes to play with needles, not because he like getting high.)
Want to show you’re a undeniable, grade-A cunt? Get a soya drink.

So now you can customize your coffee in a million different ways. And it makes you happy right? Makes you feel warm inside? Empowered and content? Feeling pretty good are we? Well no, you’re not. You have just shot yourself in your foot. And I’ll tell you why.

The more choice you have, the longer it takes for your drink to be made. Making a soya, decaf, half shot cappuccino with sugar free hazelnut syrup, whipped cream and cinnamon powder is going to take a lot longer than making a cappuccino. The more tweaks you make, the longer you are going to have to wait. The longer you have to wait, the longer the queue will become. And believe me, when you are serving hundreds of people a day, that shit adds up. Some people realize this and try to be nice and simple. They will order, “just a regular coffee.” However, sadly, due to the fact that we live in a world of the “customized consumer” these good, honest, straight forward folk are forced to endure a mini interrogation from myself.
“Is that a small, regular or large?”
“Is it to have in or to take away?”
“Is it with or without milk?”
And of course, when you are partaking in these exchanges dozens upon dozens of times a day, then it also adds up.

Now don’t get me wrong. There is nothing (well, little) bad about having choice. Choice is good. Choice, as a consumer, allows us to be ourselves. Otherwise we’d be all wearing the same clothes, eating the same food, listening to the same music, voting the same way and having the same conversations. However what you have to understand is there is a time when personalization becomes ridiculously pedantic. And you also have to know that choice leads to time. Time leads to waiting. Waiting to leads to queues. Queues lead to the dark side. And the sad fact is that the anally retentive customizing customer will be the same person tutting while they wait, complaining that their coffee is taking too long to prepare.

God, I hate you all.

Revelations and Rockers.

There’s something I have to tell you all. Something I have been struggling with for a while now. My own inner demons have been wrestling with my soul, my true feelings at conflict with the world in which I inhabit. And now these feelings have become too prominent for me to ignore anymore. I just can’t go on living a lie.

And the sad truth is I don’t actually hate my job with all the scorn and loathing that I propagate in these pages. I suppose that, in a way, I actually kind of like some aspects of my job. Sort of.

I came to this realisation while scanning over my last post. Promotion Beckons was a fairly lazy, substandard effort at attacking the dreary of promotion. It read like someone who learnt all their politics from Rage Against the Machine album covers and all their philosophy from The Matrix (which sadly, isn’t too far from the truth).

However it contained no real venom, no bite, no vicious sting in the tail; it was only a tepid, pseudo-angry tirade. And that’s because I really didn’t have the gumption and energy to put the spite into it. Because the spite isn’t really there anymore. The spite has just become a dull nagging sensation that brings me neither pleasure nor pain. My job really isn’t as bad as I make out.

I like the people I work with. I like (some) of the customers I serve. The tasks I undertake, while an inconvenience, aren’t as soul crushingly painful as I make them out to be. My life for the past few months has just been a ridiculous, hyperbolic whine. I’m just complaining for the sake of complaining and things really aren’t that bad.

Luckily now, everything is becoming a little more zen in my hectic world.

That is until Aging Metalhead Twat comes in and ruins everything for everyone.

You know Aging Metalhead Twat. He’s that guy that sits in dingy little rock pubs, studiously drinking Newcastle Brown Ale or, if he sees himself as an even higher level Aging Metalhead Twat, some locally brewed ale that tastes of warm piss but he insists is a “true drink”. He’s the guy with the scraggy old beard, dirty long hair and a stained Motorhead T-shirt. He’s the guy who is always spouting about tales long ago when he was a roadie for Deep Purple (he wasn’t) or when he snorted cocaine in a toilet with Ozzy Osbourne (he didn’t).

He is sometime surrounded by a group of impressionable teenagers who think a guy who essentially hasn’t changed his lifestyle since he was 16 years old is the coolest thing in the world. He pretends to act superior to his followers and will use phrases like, “You kids nowadays don’t know what Metal is.” But he is constantly worried that this band of followers will one day become tired of his bullshit, filter away and find a new idol (or just grow up).

So why, I have to ask, would someone who clearly has something passionately against all things modern/commercial/brightly lit, come into a modern, multinational coffee chain with all its bulbs working? Why? Because he just wants to complain.

“This coffee isn’t black enough!”

“This coffee isn’t strong enough!”

“This music is rubbish!”

“The young people next to me are too loud and dress in colours far too bright.”

It’s as if Abe Simpson has suddenly donned a dirty leather jacket with AC/DC patches.

So here’s my advice to Aging Metalhead Twats everywhere: Go back to the dark little corner of the pub that you inhabit and leave coffeeshops to proactive commuters and jittery white collar workers. You knew before you came in that you weren’t going to like the place and I’ve heard every single one of your complaints before. You’re not cool for complaining. You’re not “metal” for complaining. You haven’t showed the system by complaining. You haven’t stayed true to your lifestyle because you haven’t had a hair cut for twenty years. Now brush the cobwebs out of your beard and fuck off. You've ruined my zen.

Promotion beckons.

Ah. Soon, no longer will I be the downtrodden Barista, the lowest of the low, lapping at the most pathetic rung of the career ladder, only just above sewer rats and toenail clippings. No, soon I will be promoted to my new glorious title of Shift Leader. I will have respect from those above me and my very own underlings to degrade, humiliate and perform all the rancid tasks that I do not wish to do.

They can mop and scrub while I busy myself with paper work (and when I saw paper work I mean fag breaks). No longer with I have to have my arm thrust halfway down a u-bend unclogging several days worth of human waste. I can just summon one of the more junior staff members to do it. I can sit atop a tower of my own ego and command them from up high, and if they even so much as glance at me with disloyal eyes at my abhorrent behaviour I will strike them down with my almighty hammer of judgment. I will have them fired for insubordination. The Court Martial will be a very prominent threat while I am in charge.

Or not.

No, what will really happen is that I will get a minor pay rise, a brain crushing amount of new responsibility, more bureaucratic and corporate pressure pushing down on my shoulders and nothing to show for it other than contempt from those below me and a look of inferiority from those above. In the world of the coffeeshop it seems the further uphill you progress the more if feels like you are being kicked down.

Or another way to look at it is that the more you progress the more you are assimilating with machine and soon all your cognitive functions will be operating with terrible synchronisation to the Coffee Reich that you belong to.

Oh well. Time to plug myself back in.

A Writers Tale

Here’s some valuable advice that I have picked up from the caffeinated front line: Never, ever, engage a writer about their work. Ever.

Now, I understand the glaring hypocrisy of bemoaning writers when I myself spend most of my spare time cobbling together words to make badly thought out screenplays, ridiculous short stories and a novel which, I have to admit, will probably never see the light of day. Not to mention this irreverent blog, written as if I’m some kind of pioneering genius, the first person in the world to use the internet to bitch about their job.

However, I do try my best not to bore people in real life by explaining in excruciating detail the character arc of my latest protagonist or the subject of my latest blog rant. This, sadly, is not the case for all writers.

If you remember my Coffeeshop Bingo post a while ago I told you about Laptop Hemingway Prick, a self obsessed, waste of time fuckbag who is so studiously wrapped up and involved in his writing that he has to tell anyone and everyone about how wrapped up and involved he is with his writing. So instead of spending time writing he spends his time talking about how he spends his time writing. He therefore achieves nothing apart from boring those around him into brain-dead submission.

Luckily I’ve become fairly astute at avoiding these tedious litanies but sometimes a Laptop Hemingway Prick can be devious and not immediately obvious. Today I was suckered into talking to one.

And to make it worse, it was my day off!

Sadly my social life has come to such a grinding halt, completely diminished by my relentless work schedule that I now spend my days off in the store, just to socialize. Yes, I spend all day and all night cursing the place but still voluntarily whittle away my free time there. I understand this makes me a bellend of epic proportions. No need to point that one out for yourselves.

Anyway, so there I was, innocuously chatting away to my work mates when a regular sitting near us started to join in the conversation. I noticed he had a pen and pad of paper in front of him so I casually asked what he was writing about. This was a big mistake. My colleagues, sharper than I was, quickly vanished, suddenly remembering they were inundated with a work load that had to be done immediately. As they scampered away like wild animals from a forest fire, it dawned on me that they knew something I didn’t. Little did I know was that this regular is a Laptop Hemingway Prick (minus the laptop) and my question was the worst thing I could have asked. It was the catalyst he needed to lunch into a dreary speech about his book; a travel memoir about his life as a steward for motor racing events.

Now, motor racing is a fairly exciting sport so it takes a special kind of monotone douche to demote it to the kind of boredom usually associated with garden bowls. But boy, did he manage it. Just half an hour of being lectured on the weather conditions of Silverstone, track smoothness in Singapore and the catering service in Dubai felt like being forced to watch and entire Le Manns race, completely unedited and without sleep. I was exhausted. Exhausted and depressed.

And the worst thing was, as he was spewing this garbage, he didn’t once think that people wouldn’t be interested in his life story and his anecdotes about work. I mean, what sort of sap would voluntarily read about someone describing their life doing a tedious and monotonous job in aching detail………

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.

The Art of Queuing.

As a nation we, the British, are meant to be very good at queuing. The unwritten rule of no jumping or pushing in is upheld by a strong subconscious moral fiber embedded from a young age. This way everyone will be served in a fair and ordered fashion. Just how we like it.
And we do this. We do this very well. We are good at standing in a line, one behind another, slowly shuffling forward like coin operated penguins. However while the basic rule are almost universally upheld there are so many things that people do in queues that single them out as completely brain dead cretins. Here, for educational purposes, I give you the dos and do nots of queuing.

Do
Stand quietly and respectfully keeping all thoughts, feelings and ideas to yourself. If you are accompanied by a fellow human (or a “friend” as so many trendy hipsters are saying these days to describe other carbon based life forms with similar tastes and interests) I suppose it is acceptable to talk but everyone would be much happier if you didn’t.

Do not
Talk about the unacceptable length of the queue just loud enough so that the people serving you hear but not loud enough for it to seem like you’re being a nuisance. No one is forcing you to queue and a long queue is far more of an inconvenience for us than it is for you. So shut your cakehole and be patient.

Do
Know exactly what you want when you get to the head of the queue. If ordering for other people, treat the list of drinks like it is an important exam. Revise that shit in your head until you can recite it as easily as a twenty year old can recite The Fresh Prince of Bel Air rap. There’s nothing more annoying than someone shouting half way across the store because they can’t remember if Aunt Agatha wanted a decaf, soya latte or a single shot, semi skimmed cappuccino.

Do not
Queue alone if you’re ordering food and drink for your entire extended family. You only have two hands dipshit. You can’t carry £30 worth of coffee and cheesecake on your own. Don’t expect a platoon of pygmies or Umpa Lumpas to appear out of nowhere and escort your food to your table for you.

Do
Be succinct and quick as possible. Try and have money ready at the till.

Do not
Be an unfathomable bellend and buy a 75p chocolate bar with a credit card. Sure we accept them but that doesn’t mean we encourage it. Cards take about four times longer than cash. There’s probably a cash point across the road anyway.

Do
Be as efficient as possible while ordering. Know what you want and say it. We’re not asking you to be polite, just quick. In fact I hate it when people are polite because then I am forced to be nice back and then there is a danger of some sort of minor emotional attachment forming. That’s like a farmer being friends with his cabbages. Yes, I called you a cabbage. What are you going to do about it?

Do not
Tell me about about your day/your job/your pets/your loved ones. I’ve got a queue up to my eye balls and not one person gives a shit about your grannies hip operation.

Do
Be thankful I didn’t spit in your coffee (although this rule is flexible depending on my mood).

Do not
Expect to be served in decent time or with a smile on a weekend. It’s inevitable that we’re going to be packed all day Saturday and Sunday just like it was inevitable that someone would eventually produce some hot Na’vi hentai.

Do
Think twice about coming in. In many ways the most important rule of all. Just ask yourself, “Is it really worth my while to stand in long queue and be served by an angry underachiever only to have to pay ridiculous amount of money for a drink you could make a home?” If the answer is no then fuck off and bother someone else.

I hope you're all a little more educated now. I'm off to pick flint from my belly button while longing for the touch of a beautiful woman.

I hope you all have a rotten day.

Mechanical Breakdow

It’s 1pm on a Monday afternoon. Outside the sun is out for the first time in 4 months. The light just about manages to fight its way down through the narrow high street and finds a small foothold in our humble little coffee shop. The store is half full, customers milling about in vacant little groups, doing annoying things such as getting in the way and ordering coffee. Behind the bar our team is steadily busy but not strenuously overworked. If asked I’d almost be able to say I was having a good day. Ok, "good" would be a stretch but it’s certainly one of the less shit days.

This is until there is a bang, a large shudder of machinery and finally a dying whine from behind me. The dishwasher has decided to pack it in, fed up with its routine day in day out, and has felt the best option is to malfunction.. We switch it off before it starts spewing water all over the floor.

>Now, while this is a pain in the ass, it’s not the biggest problem in the world. We have a spare dishwasher in the kitchen that can be used till maintenance arrives. I call the maintenance guy and then switch on the dishwasher upstairs. Now this dishwasher is slow, old and takes an age to fire up. It slowly wakes, creaking, rumbling and gearing up with a metallic groan. It’s kind of like the molten metal machine at the end of Alien 3. It takes a bloody age to come into operation (and can probably be used to trap Xenomorphs).

I get it started,. We wash dishes with it for a couple of hours. The maintenance guy arrives. He fixes the dishwasher downstairs. He leaves. We go back to using the original and everything is hunky-dory, right?

It’s 8.15pm. We shut the store at 7.30 and are now closing down. We get paid until 8.30, an hour being generally enough time to close the place down. We’re on target to get out on time. I've only got upstairs to sweep and three trays of dishes to wash. I’m upstairs sweeping. From downstairs I hear a bang, a large shudder of machinery and finally an all too familiar dying whine from downstairs. Shit shit and shit.

I run downstairs. The dishwasher has gone all Linda Blair on us, projectile vomiting it’s contents all over the floor. The bar now resembles a World War One trench, dirty water flooding every surface. I call Alex, the guy that I am closing with who is doing paper work in the office. He comes down stairs, swears some obscenities, throws his arms in the air and eventually formulates a plan; We will stick the washing we haven’t done in the kitchen upstairs for tomorrow morning, mop the water up now and leave the place as clean as we can get.

So the disgusting sludge water is mopped up, which takes us till 9.00. We dump the three trays of washing upstairs and then leave.

Nine and a quarter hours later. It's 6.15am. I’m back to open the store for Tuesday morning. I’m opening with my manager, Hazel, who is already inside. She has the eyes of an enraged rhino.

“Why the hell are there dirty dishes up in the kitchen?” she practically screams.

I don’t have to be putting up with this shabby crap, not at this time in the morning. I explain about the dishwasher, the flooding and the fact that we didn’t get out till 9.00.

It doesn’t placate her. “What about the other dishwasher? Why didn’t you use that?”

“Because then we would have been here to 9.30! Don’t give a farmer a Mini Cooper and complain when he struggles to plow a field.”

“Well it’s illegal to leave dirty dishes over night. You should have done them anyway.”

“Yeah, well it’s also illegal for me to be working without having an 11 hour consecutive work break between shifts.”

She shuts up. I win. She goes and cleans the dishes upstairs and is nice to me for the rest of the day.

Oh well. I suppose every cloud has its silver lining.

In short, don’t take any shabby crap and know your rights. You’d be surprised how quickly people shit their pants when the law is mentioned. And also try and avoid working in places with dishwashers.