LIVE EVERY WEEK LIKE IT'S SHARK WEEK

Once, in my naive youth (cough, first year of uni cough), I asked a friend what I could do to make a boy I really fancied like me. Yes, I really was that sophisticated. She gave me some good advice, but she also said,

 “Don’t correct him. Boys don’t like being told their wrong.”

I considered this. Surely no-one relishes in being told they’ve made a mistake I thought.  Then told her that I had once pointed out to him that penguins came from the Antarctic, not the Arctic.

“Well don’t make a habit of it, don’t be confrontational.”

I am paraphrasing, and I’m making our exchange sound like a quote from one of the more weedy Austen characters. You know, the kind who gets colds and ends up with the crap vicar husband. But I’m sad to say the main jist of the conversation was laugh at his jokes, and shut the fuck up.

Needless to say I did not take this advice to heart. I have an extremely low tolerance for bullshit, and will never hesitate to (politely) call someone out when they’re wrong. You will be pleased to hear however, that I did get off with said boy, despite my animal habitat pedantry.

That conversation has always stuck in my mind. In between wondering what’s for tea, and whether to wash my hair, I get psudo-intellectual, and wonder, “how are women expected to act?” My dad, on two separate occasions has turned to me in shock and said

“Do you swear/burp like that in front of your boyfriend!?”

At which I burst out laughing. To me it’s so sweetly archaic. Why on earth would suppress my oral gas or guttermouth tendencies around my bf? So he’d fancy me more? I’m all for politeness, so of course I wouldn’t be effin and jeffin went I first met his family. But I would like to stay with this guy for quite a while - he’s going to have to know that I get gassy and swear when I drop things on my toes. In short, I’m going to be me.

The truth is, how women are expected to behave hasn’t changed a lot since the eighteenth century. We can vote, swear, decided whether we want to get pregnant and shave our heads if we please. Sure, it’s ok for girls to drink larger, run about and get their petticoats six inches deep in mud. But you’ll still want to put make-up on and wear pink wellies when you go paint balling. We have but what I like to call the Elizabeth Bennet/Kim Khardashian quandry (or kquandry, if you prefer). We have more rights and freedom, but the overwhelming pressure to be pretty and charming is still present. Women want to be superheroes, but the message seems to be that if you want to kick ass, you better do it wearing high heels. Look at Victoria Pendleton’s recent ad campaign with Pantene. Yes she might have won an Olympic gold, but wouldn’t it better if her hair was shiny and more manageable?

SIGH.

I do talk a lot of crap don’t I? I’m writing this as if this were all inevitable, as if it was hopeless. When in fact by being conscious of this hypocrisy mean that we’re halfway to beating it. It mean we can laugh at it and ignore it. We shall not go gentle into that good night, we shall rage rage against all the bullshit preconceptions the world has to throw at us.

Oscar Wilde allegedly said, “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken”. Whilst dear Oscar makes an excellent point, I am all for some healthy emulation. When wondering, “how am I, a devistatingly sexy and funny 20-something, meant to weave through the tangled matrix of life? WHO SHOULD I BE?” it’s good to have something to aspire to. When I was little I wanted to be Marie Curie. Now I have some more grown up and achievable heroes. Let me tell you about why I want to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer....

So no-one told you life was going to be this way...

For the past year I’ve been working in a coffee shop as a barista. See this?



 Yeah. I can’t do that. But I can make a decent coffee.

Before I got the job, I thought being barista would be a nice, cosy, fun job; making people drinks, giving them cake, talking about their day. So kitsch! Customers would fall in love with me and we’d flirt, as our fingers touched as I handed him a steaming latte. I could wear ribbons in my hair!

After my first shift, I realised it wasn’t quite like that. It was mainly steaming milk and making conversation about the weather. Over and over again. And again. Yes it has been raining a lot. No, it hardly feels like summer at all. Yes I hope it’s nice at the weekend too.

If I was scheduled for a late shift, what I affectionally thought of as “the bitch shift”, I would spend the day washing cups and plates and slinging them into Thelma, our industrial dishwasher. Sometimes trays would come upstairs practically untouched, with a barely nibbled brownie laying there seductively, like a slutty biscuit. I am not too proud to admit that I used to eat some of these leftover. Another of my fun duties was taking the rubbish to Pip the Skip, who was located down what was know as “Piss Alley”.

If the dream was Zooey Deschanel, then the reality was Gunther from Friends. The service industry is hard work. The stuff that keeps coffee shops quaint is pure hard graft and sweat.




 Before I get too snotty and spoilt second child for words, I realise there are far worse jobs than working in a coffee shop, and that emptying bins is not in fact slave labour, or an unreasonable thing to be asked to do.  Being unemployed is a terrible predicament that too many people are currently facing. However, it’s my blog and I want to whine about having to get up early. Deal with it.

You do, however, learn some incredible skills slinging coffee to the general public, just not the kind you can put on your CV. Sure, prospective employers ask about “team work” and “career goals”, but wouldn’t they be more impressed to hear that you had the balls to unblock an unspeakable toilet with a nothing but a rubber glov’d hand? That you once fended off an old man who was waving his walking stick at you and getting angry because there was no gingerbread on display? I can spill boiling hot coffee over myself and not swear. I can burn my elbow on sizzling hot panini grill, and still smile and make a joke about it to the expectant queue of people who are watching you sweat whilst debating the merits of a latte vs cappuccino.


Something that I loved about my job, and that did fulfil my kooky coffee shop wet dream, was the people. There was Ted, who was about a billion years old, and came in everyday to drink a double espresso. He always brought his tray back, and would wave at the security camera when he left. Madge had he own special drink order, halfway between an americano and a machiatto, known colloquially as a Madgachino.

Another slightly less heart-warming character was known as market man, or simply “Poo Man”. On Saturdays the market would set up along our street, and there was a long standing agreement that the stallholders could come and use our toilet. Opposite us was a Fruit and Veg stall, and the owner of this stall, Poo Man, would come and use our bathroom no less than 4 times a day. It must have been an occupational hazard of selling fruit and veg; all that fibre. He had an uncanny ability to sense just when you had cleaned that bathroom and mopped the floor, and then he’d come striding in with a cheering “alright girls” and proceed to sully our facilities.

Whilst there are undoubtedly more dangerous, demeaning and poorly paid jobs that being a Barista, the fact remains that your silky smooth latte doesn’t come fresh from the latte cow (man I wish you could get latte cows) and your paninis do not sprout from the ground (perhaps the latte cows could graze in the panini fields). It remains my view that everyone should do one week compulsory service industry work, to learn to humility and patience, and basically, not to be a dick. There is a lesson for everyone there. Don’t be a dick.