People who have never worked at a coffee shop can't possibly understand all that goes on behind the scenes to get you your caffeinated bevy. One of our regulars just started working at another coffee shop as a part-time gig while he's in grad school, and he confirmed these sentiments when after his first day, he entered our shop full of newfound awe and appreciation.
I'm a quick learner. Slow people annoy me. And I'm rarely not good at new things. (And I'm really humble). That's why it was sooooo freaking hard for me to accept the learning curve I had to operate under when I first started working at the coffee shop.
I messed up a lot of drinks. I was moving at turtle-tempo. And the endless lines of cranky customers made me want to crawl under the espresso machine and cry.
Those first few weeks were a swirling blur of cups and faces, but there were two customers that made a great enough impression that I think about them from time to time, even now, months later.
The first was a woman who ordered a cafe vanilla frappuccino, an item that somehow slipped through my beverage-training regime. For the most part, the drinks are relatively intuitive once you get the system down, so I took a stab at it, actually made it correctly, but then called it out wrong: 'cafe vanilla-BEAN frappuccino!' And OH MY WORD - THE WORLD WAS GONNA END! I'd screwed things up way worse than that (it was my first week, for goodness sake) and had gotten a lesser reaction. So, I think that it was shock more than anything - but that was the closest I'd come to crying. So, congratulations to customer-#1-that-I-will-remember-from-my-first-week.
The second customer that I will always remember from week-1 is this guy, who in the midst of the longest line ever and a drink that I spilled all over him, made me stop. look him in the eyes. and hear that my worth as a human-being doesn't correlate with my ability to make coffee. Have you ever felt like complete crap? Maybe when you were a little kid and you did something really bad and your parents were super-mad at you? There were tears everywhere, but then the 'rents hugged you and said that they love you now and always. That kind of grace is almost so good it hurts. My day - my whole first week up through that point: just crappy. And then that happened. And I wanted to cry once again. But in a good way!
I really love that quote by Plato: 'Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.' Maybe both of those customers could tell that it was my first week (let's be honest...I was a mess). Maybe both of those customers were going through their own crises, things that couldn't even compare to my relatively pathetic little foray into the world of beverage-preparation.
How do I know?
But I did take something away from those two very different customer-interactions that I've applied to life both inside and outside of the coffee shop. That 'be kind' mentality. I'll admit that I'm not always that great at it. I've got a pretty expressive face and I'm usually really upbeat, so I've been told that I don't always hide my emotions that well when someone hurts me. But when new people start working at our shop, I always try to remember back to my first weeks as a barista and extend a little extra grace to them whenever possible.
And more importantly, when customers come in that are real biz-nitches, I try (with incrementally-increasing success) to give them the benefit of the doubt and excuse their poor behavior as manifestations of battle-wounds from whatever 'hard battle' it is that they're fighting.
Best,
Lise
No comments:
Post a Comment