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.