I've never really been what you'd call a good barista. I'd rather entertain customers and coworkers than try to push some silly marketing agenda, sell people overpriced cups or upsell anything. I want to put in my hours, make some cash for the stockholders and not compromise my dignity.
Opportunities to compromise my dignity abound. Starbucks encourages a rah-rah atmosphere wherein foolish exercises that benefit the company are deemed "fun" by morons and toadies. Thankfully a frown and a furrowed brow, and a decision to do something of visible worth to the store can get you out of such silly exercises.
These people sometimes look at you askew when you don't want to play the reindeer games. "Why don't you want to make working fun?" they'll ask.
"What the hell is fun about that?" is my usual response. Usually 'that' isn't fun at all, but an opportunity to do something tedious and engage in my own patented brand of awkward social interaction.
The thats in question have included playing a form of bingo wherein various sampling exercises are performed, participation in selling contests (a few of which I've won without consciously trying), putting on frappucino suits (don't ask) and my near pathological resistance to the nuisance of active sampling (going out and giving away free stuff to customers, accompanied by a perky descriptions). I could go on. Every month there's at least one suggestion of annoying things we can do with our copius spare time.
Some people really, really take to this stuff. They deride you as cynical and lazy for not wishing to deal with it. Not that these people aren't usually good employees or even occasionally good company as well. It's just funny how hard it can be to give enough of a crap for some of them.
My current store is not plagued by an excessive devotion to the annoying practices of the marketing department. We have quite the opposite problems: sloth and illiteracy make sure that marketing makes few beachheads into the store. Nowadays I find myself fantasizing about cruel and unusual punishments for coworkers who don't follow basic equipment maintenance procedures and giving tedious instructions about how to make iced tea.
But that's all behind me now. I am almost a Green Apron Monkey no more. It's Funny how hard it is to not give a crap.
Starbucks has a 24-hour fixit line staffed by bored twentysomethings. It's called the FAST desk, which stands for something to do with facilities and services and some other words that make less sense but do the tough work of turning an otherwise meaningless series of intials into an acronym.
The thing about bored twentysomethings is that they crave entertainment. Especially at 9:30 pm on a wednesday.
FASTDBT: Hello my name is Bored Twentysomething what can I do for you tonight?
ME: I, uh, broke the pastry case.
FASTDBT: (suddenly awake) oooo, did you smash the glass part, or did you break the coolant system? Or was it something else?
ME: No. I was just changing the little plastic things around the light bulbs. When I started doing that the lights worked, when I finished they did not.
FASTDBT:(very disappointed with me and my silly, mundane problem) Have you tried wiggling them?
ME: I've wiggled everything that might bring the lights back.
FASTDBT:It says here we dispatched someone to fix your pastry lights this week.
ME: Yeah. They've been broken all week. That wasn't me though. The guy came out and did that this morning, but he didn't change the dirty little plastic tubes around the ligths while he was at it, so my boss asked me to.
FASTDBT: So then you broke it.
ME: Yup.
FASTDBT: Why didn't the tech change them himself?
ME: I'm not a psychologist.
FASTDBT: I'm going to assign the same tech to fix this. That will teach him.
ME: Teach him to trust us to finish his work?
FASTDBT: We aren't real big on that around here, no. In fact, I'm going to write down that this was his fault.
ME: rawk!
Close the polls. I have witnessed the most complicated and retarded drink that has ever been made. I think this girl's modifactions ended up making her 12 oz. latte cost about $5.25. We, of course, made her pay for every single one that we could.
I wanted to calculate how many bits of information were contained on the boxes on the side of the drink.
Below is the recipe, complete with interjections in parenthesis.
1 pump vanilla
2 and 1/4 pumps toffee nut
(elex: "what kind of drink is this?!"
her: "oh. . . a latte")
one quarter soy
one quarter nonfat
one quarter whole
one quarter organic
(me: "why do you bother putting organic milk in with all that not-organic stuff?"
her: "I just like the way it tastes."
Rob "how did you even figure out that you liked this drink?)
extra hot
5 ice cubes
(her: "six ice cubes makes it too cool, but sometimes I burn my mouth on the extra hot."
me, rob, elex: incredulous stare)
It might be added that her companion ordered almost as silly a drink. She wanted one quarter soy and one quarter nonfat. When elex asked what the other half was going to be he was met with incomprehension.
There is going to be sign on the register soon, "Must Able to Add Fractions to Order."
So you want to hate Starbucks.
That's okay with me. I've worked for them on and off for about four years. I certainly hate Starbucks in passionate fits. But I also hate people who hate Starbucks for no good reason at all. For me it's personal. You've got to have a good reason.
The fact that Starbucks is big and successful is not a good reason. There are an awful lot of people who love to complain about things (here I'm looking at you, Berkeley). Starbucks are everywhere and that, I guess, is enough to get some people going. These people complain under the "it moved" principle. They just complain because it catches their attention.
Me and the rest of the world don't really give a crap that Starbucks is "everywhere." Ignoring the siren is about the easiest thing in the world. It's just background noise and most people can tune it out if they put their mind to it.
A related point that has some validity is that the flood of Starbucks tends to drown out smaller coffee shops. This I have some sympathy for. Personally I love to spend hours going over a newspaper listening to some weird barista's mix tape at an independent coffee shop. Nowhere in Starbucks is there a atmosphere that encourages you to sit down and waste a serious amount of time.
Still, it isn't like smaller coffee shops have disappeared. They are a little harder to find these days. I don't really mind putting in the effort and taking my chances on what might be a subpar cup of coffee. Plus all the yuppies in a rush and frappucino-seeking morons are in the Starbucks, so I can read my newspaper in peace.
The complaints about the expensiveness of the coffee at Starbucks are also misplaced. You have to keep in mind that coffee shops don't have much to sell you besides coffee, so they aren't going to sell you some below cost dreck just to get you into the store. If you don't buy super-sugary complicated drinks and choose to stick to the coffee, the prices are quite reasonable. The key here is to follow the hobos. They know that a twenty-ounce cup of coffee with a fifty-cent refill is a deal. That's why all the bums love the Starbucks.
Roasted coffee is another matter. At ten dollars a pound, I can't really figure out why anyone buys our decent but uniformly overroasted coffees. Still people do buy it. Any businessman who doesn't want to sell people something they are willing to overpay for is a damned fool.
Now that the silly reasons are eliminated, lets talk about the good reasons to hate Starbucks.
Occasionally a coworker commits an act of such heroic stupidity that you doubt that you'll ever see anything like it again.
An angry customer called, up my store wanting to know the District Manager's phone number so she could complain about some damn thing or another. One of my coworkers, a supervisor amazingly enough, looked up at the emergency information on the wall and gave her the DM's cell.
And then(!) he asked what she wanted it for.
A few hours later I got a call from the DM, wanting to know why we were giving out his personal phone numbers to irritating customers.
I briefly considered telling him that it was our new method of upselling. "If you get the extra shot, I'll throw in our DM's cell number, gratis. How about it?"
The phone conversation between the DM I did not go well. It never does. He seems to think that merely by announcing his name to me, I can decipher what it is that he wants from me.
ME: El Cerrito Starbucks how can I help?
DM: This is Mac Daddy.
ME: Hey. What's up?
DM: [long pause] This is Mac Daddy.
ME: What can I do for you?
DM:This is Mac Daddy.
ME: Yeah, do you need something?
DM: This is Mac Daddy.
ME:[long uncomfortable silence as mind drifts towards China]
In his defense, my DM probably compulsively checked his stock portfolio about forty times during that interval.
The Starbucks that I work at is starting to get my imprint upon it, which is to say that it has become considerably dorkier.
We now have a guy who can program in about whatever language you want and another who studied economics at Columbia.
The programmer is a dork in the most thorough sense. He has terrible taste in music, digs cartoons and is generally messy, brilliant and averse to being told what to do.
The Columbia guy is pretty experienced in financial matters and knew I would be impressed by the fact that he had taken classes from Robert Mundell (and I was).
The presence of so many dorks has also begun to attract a fairly dorky customer base. So over the course of the night we had several discussions about the merits of campy humor (Drop Dead Gorgeous was recommended as a case study), about Mundell's beliefs in regard to the gold standard (one hour and two articles later I'm still rather fuddled about that), and the relative merits of various emo bands. (Is Modest Mouse emo?)
So I guess what I'm saying is that my life has gotten much more enjoyable because I'm surrounded by dorks.
Baristas someimes develop nicknames for certain drinks. Sometimes it is based on some aspect of the drink, sometimes the particular customers or types of customers who buy it. I thought it would be interesting to write down a number of the ones I have either heard or developed over my many years at the bux. Some things are in common usage, but most of the list is probably idiosyncratic.
Young Litigator on Crack - a venti coffee, two shots of espresso. I used to work near a law school, and this was the student favorite.
Soccer Mom - a nonfat latte
Pepto Bismal - a raspberry white mocha.
Barista's Friend - iced chai
Fallen Vegan - a soy with whip mocha.
Pregnant Teenager - a nonfat with whip mocha
Bacon Stuffed Pork - anything breve and with whip.
Keanu - an iced drink with no ice. Whoa.
Britney - a carmel frappucino.
Surf and Turf - another name for the soy with whip drinks.
The Bowel Disruptor - venti coffee and a bran muffin.
Idiot's Frappuccino - an iced mocha with blended milk.
Pancreatic Shock in a Cup - there was this one customer who would have you fill up his grande cup a quarter way with refined sugar, stir in three shots of espresso then add ten pumps of vanilla, some 195 degree steamed milk and then extra whip cream.
Side of Insulin - really extra caramel.
One Arrow, Two Targets - anything extra hot and with no foam, but especially soy drinks.
The Drink Without Qualities - decaf nonfat no foam latte. Most people call this a Why Bother? but I had a lit major coworker who thought that wasn't creative enough.
The Minister of Tool - There is nothing really so useless as a teenage boy. There's nothing nearly as horrible as one who has discovered that a particular band knows all there is to know about life. This one started in on about Tool on his interview and didn't stop until he was fired for stealing.
I don't think I've listened to Tool since I endured two hours straight of talk about Maynard's feminist phase.
Too Bad Jim - I'm not sure which comedy routine originated the point that the most troubling people in the world are not gay people or straight people but mainly those who do not know which camp they really belong in. Thus when you encounter a lisping, oversensitive Asian boy who idolizes Britney Spears, one naturally (and rightly, I still maintain) assumes that he is gay. However, this particular example maintained an elaborate fiction of heterosexuality to a disbelieving world. He got really, really offended when people assumed that and yet he continued in acting like the world's most incredible gay stereotype. This guaranteed that he got off on the wrong foot with every single person he ever met.
He also happened to be horrible at about every task, no matter how mindless, that was assigned to him. He had a special knack for finding the weirdest, worst way to do anything unless he was watched over like he was Abu Nidal or something. He was horribly sensitive about how bad he was at doing basic tasks and any instruction would quickly dissolve into tearful recriminations.
But it was his social ineptitude that was most striking. I once listened to him give a small dissertation to a horrified audience on the various effects that starbucks creations would have on his sensitive digestive system. He would interject the topic of Britney and her superness into topics that were improbably remote from the subject of mildly irritating pop divas. He willingly confessed to believing that she wrote the song "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" with only the smallest prompting.
I'm told that he eventually got less irritating. So, I'm guessing that perhaps his behavior resulted partly from discomfort at his new surroundings. I'm just not really sure I believe it.
The Slowest Boy in Dixon - This one had a special knack for making horrible tasting drinks. No one could figure out how he was doing it. We speculated that he had a secret bottle of special Fontana Brand Ass Syrup that he using when no one was watching (admittedly a rare occasion, there are parolees under less observation). He was kind of gullible, and while not exactly dumb, just slow-moving. People frequently thought he was retarded. He wasn't, so far as I know.
Massive Head Wound Harry - The starbucks management training program attracts some strange candidates. One fellow had an awful lot of stitches in his head and an accompanying lack of attention span and motor skills. He really was unable to do work, and he really should have been on disability. Working with him was awful, because he you couldn't help but get mad at him for being useless and then feeling downright awful for losing patience. He lingered on for something like three months before discreetly disappearing.
The Maneating Cow - A horrible, dwarfish manager that treated her employees like slaves and other managers like rival claimants to the imperial scepter. She was cloned from the same material that they make DMV employees out of, bad perm and all. Her feeding habits were particularly gruesome. Many of the stories about her are too disgusting to be recorded on paper.
Very Fertile Ghetto Brat #3 through #7 - Some sort of strange hiring policy in Vacaville, CA resulted in a statistically improbable number of angry, pregnant teenagers working there.
Tonight did not go well.
Serving the customers was fine. We did a lot of that. The part where we clean and stock the store, though, that was problematic. These tasks were beset by obstacles and riddled by errors.
I managed to brew coffee into an already full urn, flooding the counter. I am not, ordinarily, this dumb.
One of the customers committed an act so despicable and vile in the women's restroom that I do not wish to go into the details. Suffice it to say that I had no idea that I would spend any time at this job scrubbing feces and menses off of the floor.
You may notice a bunch of boxes in the back room. The order is not put away. This is because the person who's job it was, stayed for a little while, put a few things away and then left when I wasn't paying attention.
I want his head.
vengefully yours
~green apron monkey
How to Be A Good Customer By Not Being A Complete Jackass
1. Take your time and get your damn order right. We understand that you make mistakes and we are sure that you are a very nice person, but really that doesn't make us want to kill you any less when we find out that your sugary complicated drink was, in fact, a completely different sugary complicated drink.
2. Being friendly is okay, but please accept the fact that there are other customers behind you and that we are supposed to serve them as well. Now is not the time to try to impress the girl behind the counter by reciting your homeric life history to her. (Trust me she's not that easily impressed).
3. Keep an eye on your children, and for god's sake don't give them a scone. Children don't eat scones. They just tear them up into little pieces of carbohydrate confetti and throw them selves a little ticker tape parade. Then we have to clean it up and fantasize about imposing some sort of maoist one child policy on the country.
4. You know that joke you were going to tell us about how the tall is a small and how wacky that is? Yeah. We've heard it. Here's your coffee Mr. Seinfeld.
5. Similarly, asking if we have any coffee is not funny. We hate pretending that it is. Don't make us. (Except for the time when some joker asked me this and my store had acutally ran out of coffee, that was glorius).
6. Try not to order anything that violates known physical or logical laws. Asking us to put ice in your hot tea before it is done steeping will leave you with some water with a tea bag floating in it. That's not my fault. That's just the way chemistry works. And asking for a no foam cappucino is an act of unforgiveable stupidity. We can't really respect you afterwords.
7. See that thing behind us? That's a menu. It works just like a restaurant menu. It tells you what things are and how much they cost. Use it.
8. Regular is not a size. Regular means not decaf here. Small, medium or large work quite alright if you feel silly saying tall, grande or venti. I understand.
9. Attention: Dirty Old Men. In all of my long years at Starbucks of met precisely one cute barista girl who was prone to sleeping with dirty old man customers. I don't know what the odds are of you finding her but they can't be good.
10. Why are you leaving litter on our condiment bar, on our drink hand-off area and on our bathroom floor? Is it too much trouble to just spit on us?
How to Hold Down Your New Menial Job At My Store and Not Be Hated by Your Coworkers
or
How to be A Green Apron Monkey Just Like Me
1. Show up, and when you do, show up on time. Seriously, Woody Allen was right about this one, although his judgment on fucking young girls is quite questionable.
2. Know your asshole from your earhole. Remember that being at work is subset of surviving in the real world. Don't put forks in the electrical socket, in the blender, or in your own eye. If a word means something in the outside world, chances are it means the same thing at your new job.
3. If someone criticizes you for some errant action, and points out that it is okay because you are new, it is not an allowable move in the language game to get huffy and point out that you aren't that new.
4. It is quite alright to argue with me so long as you don't mind being wrong. If you don't like being wrong, don't argue.
5. For God's sake do not be sensitive. Listen I know what they taught you in school, that being sensitive was admirable and correct. But remember those were mostly English teachers saying that. It is their job to be about as wrong about things as an educated person can be. Being sensitive can cause you to take things personally which is a mistake because that leads you to think that I think of you as a person. Really, I don't know you and I won't get to know you for a couple of months at least. You will be like a beautiful butterfly. You will metamorphose from a pain in my side into someone that I don't wish to smack. Or I will torture you until you quit.
6. The best way to keep us from making fun of you is to not say risible things. Please do not share with us the whys and whats of your fickle digestive system. It is a proven fact that shooting fish in a barrel is really very fun. Don't give us the opportunity to be bastards. We'll take it.
7. Statistics show that there is a significant positive correlation between you quoting corporate blather from some binder at me, and you being torn apart by wild packs of dogs.
8. Don't memorize any mission statements. It will make you happier.
9. You are smarter than you think. If you learn a few things you can guess and deduce your way to mastering the rest of them.
10. But you are as dumb as I say you are. When you make a mistake you feel shame. That is normal. I'm going to give you hell and make fun of you for it because it will make it that much more memorable for you. See #5
11. Due to a tragic misunderstanding of the first amendment, many people think that they ought not to be criticized for saying dumb things. Offenders will be made to read On Liberty and the Justice's Holmes's "Marketplace of Ideas" dissent until they can truly summarize the idea of free speech for me.
Note to Openers
You may have some questions about tonight's close. I think that I can anticipate these questions and I shall do so in a Q&A format.
Q: Is this worst close ever or what?
A: By any measure we know of, yes.
Q: You guys didn't do any prep for us.
A: That isn't a question. But we ran out of most of the stuff to make the other stuff with.
Q: Where's the money at?
A: In the drop boxes where we normally temporarily store twenty dollar bills.
Q: Why the devil is it in there?
A: We would have liked to put it in the safe but were unable to.
Q: Why can't I work the safe?
A: Because it shorted out and caught on fire.
Q: Did all the money burn inside?
A: We don't know. We were unable to open the safe after it caught on fire. We flipped off the circuit breaker after it was evident that it was an electrical fire.
Q: Did you call the help desk?
A: Yes. I told them the safe was on fire. I added that it wasn't working because that seemed like a side issue at the time. The technician seemed rather flummoxed on that point. He asked if anyone had tampered with it. I admitted that I do not spend all my time with the safe. The conversation deteriorated from there.
Q: Electrical Fires smell really bad. Did the customers notice?
A: Sort of. We were saying things like "Oh my God the safe is on fire!" They were saying things like "is my frappucino done yet?"
Q: If I have any other questions can I call you?
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: After I go home and complain on my blog I'm going to heat up that bottle of sake I've been saving since my birthday. Then I'm going to drink it. Tomorrow I'll be hungover. Hungover and barbecuing lamb with friends. Do not bug me. I will be very happy. You will not. Do not bug me.