Some time in the dark recesses of last June, I found myself both without an incoming cash-flow and seemingly under the legal obligation to stimulate the economy entirely through alcohol consumption. Needing to kill two birds with one stone, I gave in to the Man, walked into the Glover Park Starbucks, and, after performing a number of ritual incantations and animal sacrifices, got myself a job. Now, for anyone of you adoring readers who knows me, the idea of me standing behind a counter wearing a green apron and serving people coffee with any semblance of "customer service" is not only laughable, but preposterous. Luckily for my bank account and the local businesses of the Adams Morgan neighborhood, my employers were unaware of this little antisocial personality trait (or, as I call it, my "independent streak"), and put me right up there on the same line with the friendly, committed, hard-working, mentally stable baristas you know and love.
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| "I think this is what the Internet said was the lethal dosage of cinnamon dolce." |
1. Smokers
When I was a child, my mother's propaganda somehow convinced me that smokers were not only the devil, but that you could differentiate a good person from a bad person solely by whether or not they smoked. A cigarette was essentially the goatee of my childhood criminal profiling.
2. Hesitators
Right now you're probably thinking, "Hey David, 'hesitators' isn't a word." I know you're thinking that because the spell check in my Google Chrome is telling me you're thinking that with a squiggly red line. But rest assured: there are hesitators out there, and they come in many forms. I'll classify a hesitator as one who habitually hesitates. There are the hesitant people that are just flat-out surprised that they're the next in line and have no clue what they want to order. There are those who take so much time in between their order items that they've convinced you they're done after every one, and then after you've effectively updated them on the individual prices of 19 products and have finally realized to just ask "Is that all?", they're majestically finished. There are those who forget that retail transactions involve monetary payments and spend a quarter of an hour flipping through both the nooks and the crannies of their purses looking for a Starbucks gift card from the Clinton administration that may or may not have any value left on it. They are all scourges upon our society.
3. Foreigners [EDIT: This section's pretty embarrassing in my wizened age, so I'll strike it out but leave it legible so people can see how stupid it is. 2/8/19]
Right now you're probably thinking, "Hey David, 'foreigners' is a little racist." I know you're thinking that because, yes, it is. It's remarkably racist. But the fact of the matter is foreigners in general cause the exact same levels of frustration and stress that cigarettes in sidewalk grooves and hesitating people cause. Say what you will about generalizations, but when working a register, your ability to make generalizations is one of the most useful talents you'll develop. I can tell you exactly what kind of person wants a receipt just by looking at them; knowing whether or not when to ask that question saves 7 seconds of my time and the customer's per interaction. After just 10 people in line, everyone's getting served more than a minute faster than they would be if I didn't happen to know that particular characteristic of old women.
What's especially frustrating about foreigners, you ask in an enlightened manner? Well, alot of them, and particularly the Russians who always came over from the embassy next door and the East Asians who apparently travel in packs through Wisconsin Avenue, don't know English. Now that in itself is fine. At the Starbucks, we don't speak English either. We don't bat an eye at the phrase "venti red eye caramel Brûlée breve cafè au lait." Our sizes are "short," "tall," "grande," and "venti," and when people order in English we have to explain that "tall" refers to what most English-speakers would call "small" and "grande" somehow means "medium." "Venti" isn't even a size, it's a Christ-forsaken Italian number, and if you order an iced one, it's the wrong number at that. We serve lattes and cappuccinos and frappuccinos, and that's not even a word in any language. What I'm getting at is linguistics shouldn't be a barrier here.
But holy shit, have you ever heard a Japanese person pronounce the word "latte"? It's like asking your dog to pronounce the word "chthonic" and then shoving mashed potatoes in his mouth before he gets past the second 'h'. In fact, foreign people generally goddamn know English. The problem is precisely that Starbucks decided one day to emulate everything Italian except their coffee beverages, and Italian is pretty much a collection of all the sounds Asians made a living butchering come back to haunt them from the dead.
On a related note, foreigners also seem to have an uncanny knack for having meals at Starbucks. For those of you unfamiliar with the Glover Park area, what it lacks in Metro stations it makes up for in delicious and affordable restaurants. Starbucks is neither. Unfortunately, it's apparently traditional in Russia to order not just a beverage and a light snack at your neighborhood Starbucks, but three each of every pound cake, two breakfast sandwiches, a cinnamon bun, four scones, and a cake pop. In fact, now that I think about it, foreigners were the only people who ever fell into Starbucks' cake pop trap.
As you might have guessed, the real victims of this stereotyping of foreigners, aside from myself, were the foreign-looking Americans who unwittingly wandered into the store. On multiple occasions, people would come into the store looking as Asian as a block of logographic text, and I would brace myself for the horrid noises of hellbeasts that someone else would have to decipher and relay to me as "medium coffee", only to be greeted by the angelic choral tones of a distinctly American accent. So it's not as racist as you thought. I may have not taken too kindly to foreigners as a Starbucks employee, but holy St. Mary did I learn to appreciate Asian-Americans.
4. Generally stupid people
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| Or the vagina, as it were. |
I remember to this day the existential crisis I endured after seeing Will Smith smoke a cigar in Independence Day. Up was down, right was wrong, left was right which was, by the transitive property of existential crises, also, apparently, wrong. And then somehow, I gradually broke down this unfounded, prejudicial belief. And by "somehow", I mean Gandalf blew a fucking ship.
Holy balls smoking is cool.
Holy balls smoking is cool.
Anyways, I'd broken down my old prejudices and finally accepted smokers for who they were - people, like us, albeit with highly underdeveloped senses of personal finance and hygiene and free will, but people all the same. Some of my best friends were smokers, and they weren't even trying very hard to murder me and cannibalize my refrigerated limbs. I was finally overcoming my childhood brainwashing. Then I started working at the Glover Park Starbucks.
And goddamn if my mother wasn't spot-on. One of my duties as a "partner" (Starbucks' new-age take on "employee/exploited minimum-wage earner") was sweeping the patio in front of the store. The patio surface was, naturally, built out of whatever extra sidewalk they had lying around at the sidewalk factory. I don't know how many of you, adoring readers, have swept a sidewalk before, but I don't expect that many of you have because it doesn't make any damn sense. So let me tell you something about sidewalks. In the United States, they're most often constructed of cement slabs divided by grooves, and, as luck would have it, those grooves have roughly the same width as a common cigarette.
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| Clearly the work of a sadistic mastermind. |
In fact, you can add the inventors of the sidewalk to this list for good measure, as they seem to be obvious co-conspirators in this scheme.
What bothers me most about this epidemic of cigarette-filled sidewalk grooves is that there was an ashtray right on top of the trash can outside. Granted, it would probably suck to walk back and forth to a trash can after every cigarette, and your lungs have been worked hard enough already, but there is literally no other socially acceptable circumstance for such repetitive littering, especially in Washington, the District of Columbia, this beacon of light shining forth from the hilltops the liberated grandeur that is my country 'tis of thee. Imagine if everyone just decided, "Jeez, I really should throw this out, but, y'know, that trash can is all the way over there. Nah, I'll just throw this cup/napkin/bag in which this cardboard-flavored food came/assorted Starbucks-emblazoned packaging on the ground. Oh, no, it's cool. I'll stomp it out."
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| "Shit, it's like...behind Janet and everything. It's not like this bag is full of arsenic or anything." (Yes, that's my actual Starbucks patio. Google is ridiculous.) |
Of course, their line of reasoning makes perfect sense. Considering our society's "do unto others" morality, smokers are really only doing the moral thing here. After all, as they would have cyanhydric acid done unto them, they should have no qualms about doing it to the planet. But holy Christ, I have to sweep up that crap with all the precision of a broom that served its country in the Korean War, while you and those buddies you made back in sidewalk-design school are tag-teaming me with more efficient coordination than the Justice League ever mustered together.
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| "You'd think with our powers combined, we'd have found Wonder Woman's pants by now." |
It's more than a little inconsiderate. Even though I don't have to put up with that nonsense anymore, just do like you do with every other piece of non-poison-laden refuse you have and walk to the goddamn garbage can.
2. Hesitators
Right now you're probably thinking, "Hey David, 'hesitators' isn't a word." I know you're thinking that because the spell check in my Google Chrome is telling me you're thinking that with a squiggly red line. But rest assured: there are hesitators out there, and they come in many forms. I'll classify a hesitator as one who habitually hesitates. There are the hesitant people that are just flat-out surprised that they're the next in line and have no clue what they want to order. There are those who take so much time in between their order items that they've convinced you they're done after every one, and then after you've effectively updated them on the individual prices of 19 products and have finally realized to just ask "Is that all?", they're majestically finished. There are those who forget that retail transactions involve monetary payments and spend a quarter of an hour flipping through both the nooks and the crannies of their purses looking for a Starbucks gift card from the Clinton administration that may or may not have any value left on it. They are all scourges upon our society.
Working behind the counter in the morning at a coffee shop is hectic business. You're guaranteed a line out the door, and these people's coffee experience is going to set the tone for the rest of their day. It's a high pressure environment, and how you handle it can either increase that pressure like Giles Corey's dying words or prudently maintain the level of ordered chaos on which the Glover Park Starbucks thrives. Somehow, you've gone from not even knowing of the existence of hesitators to a seasoned veteran of the cash register. Looks like someone's a rising star. Anyways, you throw a hesitator, even just one, into that precarious mix, and all of a sudden that wary balance between order and anarchy you've been doing your darnedest to manage has been wrenched from your control, and by a person who doesn't have the mental capacity to understand basic social interaction no less.
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| They help with the bone density. |
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Stupid, much like hesitation, comes in an abundance of forms. When there's a line in the Starbucks, someone generally takes orders down the line and writes the orders down on cups. That way, the person working the bar can work on the drinks before people come up to the register. It reduces wait times and allows the line to move faster. Unfortunately, it's also a system which brings out the worst in the intellectually impaired.
Inevitably, this situation arises: the person two people behind the person at the counter asks for a coffee, and since coffee takes 12 seconds to make, we just get it ready for him and put it on the counter (coffee goes out at the counter, espresso-based drinks at the end of the bar). The person at the counter, who just put in his double tall skinny vanilla latte order, will automatically assume that the large coffee on the counter is his drink and grab it. We're all left to wonder where that coffee we'd just gotten seconds earlier for the man who's now at the counter is, and so we have to grab another for him. 10 minutes later, that first person comes back bewildered, and says in a tone that gives away his inferior mental faculties, "This... doesn't taste like a double tall skinny vanilla latte." Well, yes, that's because it isn't, and the one that we did make for you has now gotten cold because it took you an inordinate amount of time to tell the difference between water- and milk-based beverages, and now we have to make another one for you. These people make me cry.
As a corollary to this unfortunate and retarded circumstance, we have the even stranger case of the amnesiac customer. These are not so much frustratingly infuriating as pitiable, and could be equally split between the hesitating and stupid customer categorizations. Returning to the scenario outlined above, say that the person behind the person getting coffee, the fourth person in line, asks for a grande non-fat cappuccino from the person taking orders down the line. Now, when she gets to the register, she's supposed to tell the cashier what she wants because, once again, that's how financial transactions work. This specific type of mental lapse generally begins with her standing in front of the cashier, expecting him to just shout a price at her, magically aware of what she told a completely different person 2 minutes before. When he finally asks, "So what did you have?", she'll respond as if asked to solve the economic crisis; vaguely offended, seemingly aware that in what must have been a past life she knew this answer, until the person who took her order reminds her, "Grande non-fat cappuccino." It is a strange sight, to say the least.
Then there are the people who are so impossibly stupid that they don't understand how trash cans work. I mean that in the most literal way possible. Not like smokers, who understand the concept of trash cans and choose not to participate in it, but people who truly think that a trash can is somehow a portal to another world filled with magic and wonder and, presumably, garbage.
Talk to any Starbucks employee, and they'll have a trash can story. Sure, you'll get some basic ones, like people just thinking putting an empty cup into an overflowing trash can somehow works, despite the other three perfectly empty ones in the store, but there are also some fantastic ones that will give you the most disappointing insight into the species imaginable. Here are mine:
In the first, I'm changing the garbage in one of the cans that had an outer shell that served to funnel the trash into it. I had to take the shell off, and as I'm standing next to the shell changing the naked trash can, someone throws their straw wrapper into the empty shell and keeps on walking out of the store like it was nothing. Impressive, you might think, but not so much as my next one.
In this scenario, I'm changing the garbage of the condiment bar, where that magical "Starbucks hole" is. I had to pull it out of the cabinet to take the bag out, rendering the hole in the top of the cabinet useless. My trash can and I are not twelve inches away from the condiment cabinet. A few customers come to the condiment bar and start fixing up their drinks, and I apologize for the inconvenience and tell them they can throw everything out in just a second. Right after I said these words to his actual, human face with eyes and ears and everything, one of those customers pours his coffee into the Starbucks hole. The hole that would have a trash can in it, were it not for the fact that that trash can is on the floor in front of me. I can't even put the trash can back in the cabinet because I have to clean the coffee out of it now, and the Starbucks has descended into madness. But more importantly, holy shit why was that guy allowed in my species?
So watch out. If you fall into any of these categories, rest assured that every time you have stepped into a Starbucks, someone with my disposition has been slightly more annoyed than they otherwise would have been had you stayed home. If you are one of those unfortunate few, do what you can to change that. Throw out your cigarettes. Figure out what the hell it is you want in the five minutes you're standing in line. Stop being so foreign. Develop a rudimentary understanding of the physics of waste management. If not for my sake, for the sake of those poor souls forced to do the devil's bidding in a godawful green apron. But mainly for my sake.
As a corollary to this unfortunate and retarded circumstance, we have the even stranger case of the amnesiac customer. These are not so much frustratingly infuriating as pitiable, and could be equally split between the hesitating and stupid customer categorizations. Returning to the scenario outlined above, say that the person behind the person getting coffee, the fourth person in line, asks for a grande non-fat cappuccino from the person taking orders down the line. Now, when she gets to the register, she's supposed to tell the cashier what she wants because, once again, that's how financial transactions work. This specific type of mental lapse generally begins with her standing in front of the cashier, expecting him to just shout a price at her, magically aware of what she told a completely different person 2 minutes before. When he finally asks, "So what did you have?", she'll respond as if asked to solve the economic crisis; vaguely offended, seemingly aware that in what must have been a past life she knew this answer, until the person who took her order reminds her, "Grande non-fat cappuccino." It is a strange sight, to say the least.
Then there are the people who are so impossibly stupid that they don't understand how trash cans work. I mean that in the most literal way possible. Not like smokers, who understand the concept of trash cans and choose not to participate in it, but people who truly think that a trash can is somehow a portal to another world filled with magic and wonder and, presumably, garbage.
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| Trash cans. |
In the first, I'm changing the garbage in one of the cans that had an outer shell that served to funnel the trash into it. I had to take the shell off, and as I'm standing next to the shell changing the naked trash can, someone throws their straw wrapper into the empty shell and keeps on walking out of the store like it was nothing. Impressive, you might think, but not so much as my next one.
In this scenario, I'm changing the garbage of the condiment bar, where that magical "Starbucks hole" is. I had to pull it out of the cabinet to take the bag out, rendering the hole in the top of the cabinet useless. My trash can and I are not twelve inches away from the condiment cabinet. A few customers come to the condiment bar and start fixing up their drinks, and I apologize for the inconvenience and tell them they can throw everything out in just a second. Right after I said these words to his actual, human face with eyes and ears and everything, one of those customers pours his coffee into the Starbucks hole. The hole that would have a trash can in it, were it not for the fact that that trash can is on the floor in front of me. I can't even put the trash can back in the cabinet because I have to clean the coffee out of it now, and the Starbucks has descended into madness. But more importantly, holy shit why was that guy allowed in my species?
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| Whatever this is, it has a greater claim to humanity that that fuck-up. |
So watch out. If you fall into any of these categories, rest assured that every time you have stepped into a Starbucks, someone with my disposition has been slightly more annoyed than they otherwise would have been had you stayed home. If you are one of those unfortunate few, do what you can to change that. Throw out your cigarettes. Figure out what the hell it is you want in the five minutes you're standing in line. Stop being so foreign. Develop a rudimentary understanding of the physics of waste management. If not for my sake, for the sake of those poor souls forced to do the devil's bidding in a godawful green apron. But mainly for my sake.
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