Sometimes, We Don't Use Filters...

The first time he brewed coffee, one of the new baristas at our shop neglected to use a filter.  It was basically a mess.

Filters, in coffee and in life, are generally good things. 

Yesterday was slow. There were about four of us standing around doing nothing: zero customers, no syrups to refill, no cups to restock, no dishes to be done. 

This never happens, so we didn't know what to do with ourselves.

We hired a new girl last week who is about 5 months pregnant (give or take?) and pretty shy (relative to the generally uninhibited atmosphere around her).

Neglecting to insert his filter before he spoke, one of our co-workers, in attempts to fill the silence of the afternoon, goes up to the new girl and asks her:

'Sooooo, are ya getting pumped?'

'For what?'

'All the pain you're going to be in, in a few months when you have to give birth?'

Blank stares...mouths open in disbelief...did that realllly just happen?

Filters are good in coffee and in life. 

An Experiment

Today was one of those 'be kind (everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle)' type of days.

My immature, 19-year-old co-worker's ability to perform simple tasks (like pouring a cup of coffee) bears an inverse relationship to the amount of jabber he spews out of his mouth.  Since multi-tasking isn't his strong-suit, I find myself on his case to get stuff done more often than I'd like.  He's pretty ridiculous and thinks himself rather clever (don't get me wrong...he has his moments), but when I'm short with him it's really just because he needs someone to snap him back to the tasks at hand; plus,  he can take it (he knows we're besties)!

In church this morning, as part of an aside to the broader message, the pastor mentioned the opportunity we have for silently praying for the different people we encounter during our days, e.g., the checkout girl at the grocery store or the person in front of us at the post office.  What a unique opportunity I have for applying this practice, since I literally come in contact with hundreds of coffee-drinkers each day.

So, I started my shift with the intention of trying to pray a short blessing into the lives of my co-workers and all the different people I handed drinks to today.

Jesus tells us to love and pray for our enemies, and since it's hard to be frustrated or annoyed or angry with people you're praying for, I think that He was on to something there.

I found myself actually seeing the people I gave drinks to, instead of the blur of hands that customers sometimes become to me during the afternoon rush.  I noticed things about customers that typically don't even register on my radar, and I let those things kind of guide and inspire how I prayed: if I noticed a wedding ring I might have prayed that God bless the customer's marriage; if I noticed a school sweatshirt on a college-aged person, I prayed a blessing over this amazing and formative period in said customer's life.

Just the other day, I had an encounter with one of the rudest customers I'd ever had the misfortune of serving an Ameri-misto to, and where several months ago, the way he spoke to me would have really affected and hurt me, this latest experience simply left me incensed.  Back when I first started and mean customers used to really hurt my feelings, I explained my sensitive reaction to my supervisor as a positive thing since it meant that I cared.  Somewhere along the way I guess I lost that, and I hadn't even realized that I did until my encounter with Jerky McJerkerson meant nothing to me.  Since then, I'd actually been searching for a way to 'care' again, and I think that with this little experiment in praying for our patrons, I may have just found it!

But back to my multi-taskingly-challenged co-worker.  A couple hours into our shift together, he mentioned that today was the one-year anniversary of his father's death.

Maybe it was the affect my experiment had on the way I was interacting with him today that made him feel like sharing this with me.  It sounded like he needed to get some more stuff off his chest, so I asked him to tell me about his dad.  He went on to talk about his pop like he was the man.  They had an amazing relationship, he died unexpectedly from a heart attack, and his absence in their family has left a void in my co-worker's heart that hurt me to hear about.

Father, bless my friend. 

Give Thanks.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am thankful that I did not have to make a single latte today!  Our shop's open 365 days a year, and since I'll be flying home for a few days at Christmas, I assumed I would've had to put in some holiday-time today.  But by some stroke of a miracle, I was off!

I'm also thankful that I do work tomorrow.  I don't always have the best attitude about my job.  It pains me to admit that more often than not, I'm a bit embarrassed and bummed about the fact that I work at a coffee shop when my friends have been doing everything from grad school and med school to youth pastoring and teaching since graduation.  I felt useful and productive as an AmeriCorps member last year, but since my term of service ended a few months ago, I can't help but feel like I've taken a few steps back.

I spent Thanksgiving with my 'DC family' (my cousin and her husband and my aunt and uncle). Every year, they join forces with their besties up in Baltimore for Thanksgiving festivities.  It was a mixed bag of guests - my aunt and uncle's friends, their grown children and some grandparents thrown in for good measure.  Basically, a lot of people I didn't know.

It's stupid, but all day I had been kind of dreading the question that ultimately crops up as you move through the gamut of make-your-acquantiance niceties: 'So, what do you do?'

I found myself almost making apologies for what I deemed an unsuitable use of my time: 'Welllllll....I'm kind of in-between things right now.  I moved out here to do AmeriCorps after college...that recently ended and I'm looking for a job in non-profits now....but I'm just working at a coffee shop in the meantime.'

I'm lame. I know.

But my 'DC family' and all their friends are so cool- my uncle's a chemist, my aunt's a librarian, my cousin's in public health.  And of the 'people I didn't know': one was a horse-vet, one was a doctor, another was an attorney...and one was super-cute and little and 90 years old!  They were mostly all in their mid- to late-twenties (except for the cute 90-year-old), and I was intimidated.

In light of Thanksgiving, I've been thinking about something G. K. Chesterton wrote: 'There are two ways to get enough: one is to continue to accumulate more and more.  The other is to desire less.'

This quote is significant on a lot of different levels:

Here's a easy one- all the crazies who have been lining up since this morning outside of Best Buy in order to partake in the Black Friday madness.  It's like, why?

Or - how I spent the day surrounded by DC professionals young and old and in-between. I don't know much about the crew I just met tonight, but the general mindset I've witnessed in their contemporaries out here over the past year, is one centered on amassing 'more and more' power, wealth and prestige.

And then -  I'm embarrassed by my job?  I should really be embarrassed by the amount of clothes I have in my closet or  the mass of things I have cluttering up my room.

That last part - 'the other is to desire less' - this applies to material things (duh), but when I was thinking about my life, the thing that I desire the most right now is meaningful employment.  I think it's okay that we want things (especially 'good' things like a job we can care about) so long as there's balance.  But sometimes, I think that I desire a different job to an unproductive degree.  I'm doing all the right things in the job-hunt realm, so it'll happen when it happens - letting it consume my thoughts and attitude won't speed up the timeline.  Being a barista just has to be enough for now, and I have to be okay and even thankful for that!

So, this Thanksgiving I am thankful (in addition to all the blessings of health, home, family, friends, etc) for my job.

Later,

Lise

Secrets: Redux.

One of my supervisors was fired this week.

This blog is fairly anonymous: I don't use names and I purposefully don't associate myself with the actual shop and company I work for.  I have no idea who, if anyone (...besides the small group of friends I happened to mention it to), stumbles through my random musings on life from behind the espresso machine.

But writing's kind of always been my outlet.

If you'll recall, I wrote a post a couple weeks ago about how people always tell me secrets and stuff.  Well, sharing's not exactly a two-way street for me.  I'm horrible at talking about my feelings, and I'm super non-confrontational.  So whenever I've had to express things of a warm and gooey or a hard and messy nature, I'd much rather write than voice them.

For instance, I had to complete a 'philosophy of life' project for my senior seminar course in college, where I was given the opportunity for in-depth exploration of the lens through which I view the world; I then had to thoughtfully analyze my principles and beliefs using a medium of my choosing.  I chose to write a series of thank you letters to family members, friends, mentors and the like for investing in my life up until that point, highlighting how those important souls played a part in the way I'd come to see the world.  I handed the project in to my professor, but chickened out and never actually sent the letters to their intended audiences.

I don't know why, but there's something about saying something honest out loud (or in writing), having people hear it, and then never being able to get it back, that makes me uncomfortable.  But I'm working on it.

Without going into all the minutiae of the situation, this supervisor of mine was fired on account of sexual harassment.  One of my co-workers came to me last week, and she said that he 'slapped her ass' one morning when they were opening together.  I was disgusted and offended, especially since this wasn't the first time that I'd noticed inappropriate encounters with female employees (and customers) on his part.  My co-worker and I talked about what might happen if she were to tell our manager, and she ultimately decided to report him a couple days later.

Hypothetically, if I were the type of person who talked about messy stuff, I might admit that over the course of the first few months of my freshman year in a brand new high school where I knew not a soul, something in a similar-ish vein routinely happened to me at the hands of an individual whose name and face I can't even remember now some ten-odd years later (TEN YEARS since freshman year of high school?!), but whose actions still cut - just every once in a while - but especially when I come in contact with grown men who have gotten this far in their lives without someone coming forward and initiating the proper mechanisms to stop their behavior.

I'm really proud of my co-worker for reporting the situation because I don't know if I would've had the courage, had I been the one in her position.

But I was really disappointed in the way the company that we work for handled things.  I believe that there should be an expeditious policy of zero-tolerance in regard to harassment.  There is a time and a place for the slapping of asses...? but it's not in the workplace.  After the report was made, a week+ long investigation into the situation on the part of district management was launched.  The supervisor in question had no idea that he was being investigated, and so all the while, he was allowed to continue working - often right alongside the young woman he violated.

I understand that there is a process that must be followed and a paper-trail that must be left in these situations, but that still kind of irks me.

. . .

Lise

Coffee & Kindness

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

Telling Secrets

So, people tell me things.  It's always kind of been the case.  Sometimes they're big secrets, sometimes minuscule tidbits of gossip.

Sometimes I have a bunch of secrets in my possession all at once and I just feel like I need to spew them or I'll explode.  Back in college, I came up with a solution to this: my roomie became my blabber-mouth-buddy.   People told her a lot of stuff too, and so it just kind of happened that people could assume that if I knew something, so did Nicole (and vice versa).  Don't get me wrong; there were exceptions to this rule -  if it was a real whopper of a secret, my lips were sealed.

Have you ever noticed that there's something about coffee shops that just simply begs for the telling-of-secrets?

I get to share a few moments of conversation at the bar with handfuls of random customers I've never met before, who are just passing through on their ways to whatever's next in their days, and who I will probably never see again.  In these moments while I'm finishing up their beverages, in an attempt to fill the awkward space and time between us, or perhaps because there's a primal need within all of us to tell someone, anyone, our 'stuff,' I get told things.  Often, things more personal and intimate than I, in my role as annonymous-beverage-preparer deserve.

Frederick Buechner, in his memoir that shares the same title as this blog post, writes that:

'What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else.  It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are. . . because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing.  It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier. . . for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own. . .' (Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets)

And it's not just customers that come in and share their little and not-so-little secrets.  It's the co-workers too.  You work with the same group of people a lot.  It's not overly-taxing work or anything, so there's a lot of opportunity for 'doing life' with your fellow baristas while making beverages.

I made the observation to a co-worker the other day that our shop is becoming a 'boys club.'  We've had a lot of recent turn-over and it just so happens that our guy:girl ratio has gotten ridiculously skewed (we're talking like 10:4 here).  So, I work with boys all day long, but I have a brother....and this theory that growing up with sisters makes guys better guys.  All I can say is, you'd be surprised at how many guys truly enjoy girl-talk once you get 'em started. 

I have a veritable menagerie of coffee shop secrets - people's fears, pains, hopes, embarrassments.  Once I started thinking about this and the fact that I'm trusted, in some small way, to be the holder of these precious things that live at the core of our humanness, I came away with a new appreciation for the people I come in contact with every day.  The fact that we all have these secrets binds me to even that a-hole who comes into the shop and rudely has us re-make his 'messed-up beverage' for free on a daily basis, which I'm convinced he never even purchased in the first place. 

And that's kind of cool.

Lise

Playlist

If I could make a playlist for the coffee shop:


1. 'Poison and Wine,' The Civil Wars
2. 'Follaton Wood,' Ben Howard
3. 'Dueling Ninjas,' Trace Bundy
4. 'This Woman's Work,' Greg Laswell
5. 'We Will Become Silhouettes,' The Postal Service
6. 'Get it Wrong, Get it Right,' Feist
7. 'The World Spins Madly On,' The Weepies
8. 'Heart of the Matter,' India Arie
9. 'Casimir Pulaski Day,' Sufjan Stevens
10. 'Motorcycle Driveby,' Third Eye Blind
11. 'Evelyn,' Gregory Alan Isakov
12. 'Rambling Man,' Laura Marling
13. 'Just Not Each Other,' William Fitzsimmons
14. 'Rise,' Eddie Vedder
15. 'Sodom, South Georgia,' Iron and Wine
16. 'You're Not Listening,' The Rescues
17. 'The Story,' Brandi Carlile
18. 'The Crane Wife 3,' The Decemberists'
19. 'Reasons to Love You,' Meiko

Coffee House Playlists

I definitely judge people based on their tastes in music.  You know when it's done right: the poetry of beautiful lyrics melding to the rhythms and melodies of instruments I so wish my parents had forced me to take lessons in as a child.  I just don't understand people who can be indifferent to good music, or worse still, people who actually enjoy country music.

I went to Hope College, a small liberal arts institution of the Reformed Church of America persuasion, nestled in the charming town of Holland, MI.  Remember Stars Hollow? That disgustingly cute, fictional town from Gilmore Girls?  Well, if you've never had the privilege of visiting Holland, MI: home of the Annual Tulip Time Festival, Captain Sundae, and 149 years of fine liberal arts education, then just think 'Stars Hollow' and you're on the right track.

Needless to say, the Holland, MI folk don't really take kindly to franchises where local can do it so much more endearingly, and let's face it, better.  No Starbucks or Caribou for us, sir!  If you want coffee in Holland, MI you have two options: JP's or Lemonjellos.  The two shops sell coffee, and that's about where the similarity ends.  Atmosphere, patronage, music, employees and artwork could not be more different.   As a student, I frequented both shops with regularity (some people were loyal JP-ists and others die-hard Lemonjellos fans, but I saw no problem with soaking up the unique coffeehouse-goodness each shop had to offer).

Where Lemonjellos had JP's beat, however, was definitely in the music scene.  If we were to draw some sort of line of demarcation, then Lemonjellos, I suppose, would be the more ostensible choice for the college students, while JP's would probably be the coffeehouse-of-choice for your typical Holland townie.  As such, Lemonjellos was way more into hopping on the fair trade-bubble tea-vegan pastry-pretentious music-train than it's counterpart, JP's.  Lemonjellos also doubled as a small concert-venue a few nights a week, bringing in some of the college's talent as well as other local and even a couple larger-name groups to perform.

Coffeehouses provide soundtracks for their patrons' meetings, study-sessions and first dates.  I work for one of the big, franchisey coffee conglomerates, not one of the local and full-of-character little guys like JP's or Lemonjellos.  We have this established set of music we play on repeat all day until the 'music specialists' down at corporate give us their next installment to slap on.  While it pains me to admit that some of the stuff they have us play is pretty darn acceptable, for a while there we were selling the Beatles Number 1 Hits compilation cd in our stores, and it was all-Beatles-all-the-time for like 3 straight weeks.  I don't care how great the Beatles are. Not okay.  (Oh, and I'm so looking forward to November 15th when the round-the-clock Christmas music begins..)

As someone who secretly strives to be one of those super-cool pretentious music snobs like Julie (friend from college, die-hard Lemonjello's fan, and associate editor at this super-cool blog [check out her stuff if you, like me, are interested in increasing your music-snobbery]) I really miss the non-contrived soundtracks of the local shops.  And how cool would it be if the big coffee shops started hosting open-mic night - just once a month or something?

Anyway, till next time,

Lise

(p.s. - maybe if you're lucky, I'll impart upon you my own 'coffee house playlist' next time).

My Mantra...For This Chapter

I don't do an amazing job at being present/content when I feel like I'm not where I want to be, doing what I want to be doing.  But that's silly.  

It's also definitely an entitled, pride thing.  I worked hard for four years in college (....on my parents' dime).  I 'gave a year of my life' to AmeriCorps (so we live below the poverty-line for a measly year and qualify for food stamps - big woop - some of my students from the organization I worked with during my term of service were supporting families of 5+ on the equivalent of my stipend). 

Nowadays, work with/serve coffee to/do life with a lot of beautiful, interesting people.  And while this may not be what I imagined my life would be like going on my second year post-college, this is where I am.  And until I am somewhere else: 

"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness; touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” 

-Frederick Buechner

Customer-Interactions: The Funny And The Creepy

When you work at a coffee shop (so I'm learning) you cross paths with some really interesting characters.

One of my co-workers has been moving his way up the ladder from barista to supervisor over the course of the past 3 years.  He usually supervises the closing shift, so we work together a lot.  Our regulars, the cool ones and those interesting ones too, get used to having us there at night.  And so an on-going rapport develops:

The guy that supervises the closing shift is one of those 'can't-really-tell-if-you're-being-a-sassy-jackass-but-it's-somehow-endearing-so-I'll-just-let-it-slide' types.  Every night before close, we have these two macho construction workers come into the shop to caffeinate before heading out to start their over-night shifts tearing up some part or another of 495.  For as long as I've worked there, and for who knows how long before that, their 'thing' has been giving my co-worker crap. Because he's an ass and it's funny.

A couple weeks ago, one of the macho construction workers was being unusually nice to my co-worker and he even invited him to his farm to shoot skeet or something...is that even a thing, or did I just make that up?  My co-worker gave the guy his number, but then after they left he turned to me with second thoughts, wondering if that was weird.  Meh. Whatevs.

The next night, my co-worker was all: 'I need to talk to you. Something happened last night after I locked up.  Remember those construction guys who always come in?  Well, the one who invited me to his farm was waiting for me by my motorcycle after I locked up.  He was being all nice and creepy and showing me pictures of his farm on his phone.  Do you think he invited me to his farm to kill me?'  I could tell that he was joking, but still freaked out.  Apparently there was an 'elbow-grab' during some part of their conversation the previous night.  He was all - 'maybe you could walk me to my motorcycle after close tonight..haha?' But kind of serious.

When the construction guys came in later for their nightly coffees, my co-worker high-tailed it to the back-room, having previously given me instructions to feel the situation out.  The guys and I were chatting while I was making their drinks, and the one asked me where my partner in crime was?  'Oh, just doing some dishes in the back,' I replied.  He turns to his friend and goes, 'I was totally effing with him last night!  It was hilarious.  I waited for him by his bike after he locked up and he was completely freaked out.  He's probably hiding from me.  Punk.'

Okay.  Funny-ish.  Boy-humor, maybe?  I don't get it?  But still, maybe not a bad idea to institute some sort of 'make sure everyone makes it safely into their cars after we get out of there at midnight' rule. Just in case.

Especially since this happened last week:

It was a slow night, and I was minding my own business working at the bar, while this other girl was on register.  All of a sudden, I was disrupted from my drink-making-zen-rhythm by:

'You're a vegetarian, aren't you?'

....confused...open-mouthed...blank stare...oh SHOOOOT, those espresso shots are expiring while I'm trying to figure out how this weirdo I've never seen before knows that I prefer meals of the non-animal-variety.

'I can tell because of your body-type.'

....Anddd there's my answer.  My body-type.  Of course.  It's only covered by my baggy collared shirt and this super-cool apron.  But, why not?

I quickly prepare dude-who-thinks-it's-appropriate-to-comment-on-his-barista's-body-type's beverage and hand it off, hoping to sneak away to the back ASAP.  Except for he decides to spark up a twenty-minute conversation (...slow night) that leads us on a scintillating journey from the three most recent items he's crossed off his bucket-list all the way over to Roth IRA's...?

It was realllllly weird.  And officially, my creepiest customer-intereation to date.

Anyways dudes, in case there was ever any shadow of a doubt, waiting for a male barista that you've known for years by his bike after close to 'mess with him': funny(ish).  Citing your female barista's body as a conversation-opener: creepy.

Till next time,

Lise