My first morning on the job the only men above age fifty that I spoke to were better groomed than any human I’d ever seen, and I was shocked that I could feel so minute and beholden to them, these complete male strangers. The women were much the same, but they frightened me.
Subjects of this broad customer base – affluent businesspeople flitting in between meetings or before elevating up to their ocean-view offices; inexplicably surgeried my-aged women strolling up with their lips and nails, wanting almond milk mistos only, all of them; all ranges of the vapid and devoid, the distracted and distant, consumed by phone or by self or by the smallness of me in their shadow, the sight of which I know gives some people elitist fortitude of a special, lonely kind – are certainly not representative of everyone I serve in a day. They do arrive on consistent enough a basis, however, to expect to feel the weight of their wonder at some point during the day. Sometimes the burnout comes later in the afternoon, when sanity dictates a break from any activity; other days, you can see the line forming out the door and you know it’s just a deck of teetering dominoes that by the fancy of the wind will tumble each in your direction, where you stand on your mat in your work boots brushing coffee grinds onto your legs.
For a long time I came to see this tidal wave of personality as a power gradient which favoured me least. Most customers treated their daily (read: horribly stagnant and predictable and boring) trips for coffee as a right, an entitlement. Coffee to people like this is as integral a part of their morning as is brushing their teeth: their day does not really begin until that box has been checked. They’re not fit for the world until they’ve been caffeinated. They can’t imagine embarking on their noble quest of vocational contribution until the americano they hold in the paper cup that will be expedited to the landfill has been consumed, diluted by just the right quantity of cream (oat milk, if vegan).
But let’s allow for an interjection of compassion. Paying for coffee is likely the first chore taken place outside the home in the morning; it demarcates separate realms of heavenly privacy and societal obligation, to the economy, to one’s boss, to the sphere of relative influence refracting sun’s light around a body. The cafe is not unlike a demilitarized zone for the proceedings of the day. You are safe to order coffee whether you are in fact wearing a suit and have paid for a hair treatment in the last week and have a car that could pay my rent. But you are also safe if you’re running late, or unemployed, or depressed. If you’re extracting every delayed second from your morning until you absolutely have to be somewhere. If you’re perfectly friendly and interesting. If you really care about the coffee I get paid my own share to make, or if you do not.
I’ve started to think of an inversion in power. I’ve started to recognize the privilege I’ve had as a witness, the access to these surreptitious minutes spent in a line, exchanging money for goods, presenting to the rest of this neighbourly bubble the form you presently inhabit, for better or worse. A barista’s position is static, meaning limited omniscient: we have eyes on the room but the room is itself our bounds. I can only guess at the frequency of your meetings or how much of the water you can spy from your desk. I don’t know why the attitude, some days. I do though see faces returning, on end, and at each encounter I feel the crystallization of some tacit understanding, between me and them, me and you. One that begets some semblance of appreciation for one another. You see me in a dirty white shirt with stained fingernails, stress-sweating off makeup applied well before dawn; I see you in moments of vulnerability before entering into worlds of decision-making, tactic-enacting, cash-printing. I know you’re not here for too long but it’s where you place your foot before the leap. You live on the other side of the ravine and your fields are groomed and verdant new and make me sigh in my own moments of clandestine contemplation. But I’ll stale and expire if I don’t come to terms with the views. I’ll dial in my shots and somehow find solace in the fact that my home’s already built, underfoot, overhead.
Suck a dick Vancouver coffee snob.