The Disgruntled Customer Cafe

There's a cafe in the building where I work. This makes it handy, as far as fancy coffee drinks in the morning and the occasional muffin or scone. I've had plenty of lattes, americanos, and pastries from there, in fact.

But a few months ago I swore off the cafe. I'd had one too many discouraging experinces with greasy grilled cheese sandwiches, bad jazz blaring over the speakers, and long, long lines that terminate with one frazzled, semi-competent barrista.

Over here on my company's end, complaining about the cafe (its food AND service) is quite the pastime.
It's a topic everyone can relate to, and there's an endless supply of Bad Cafe Experiences.

"I was in there and saw the barrista wiping the rim of a cocoa mug off with the same filthy rag they'd just wiped the counter down with."

"Yesterday I had to wait an hour for my salad--and I'd even phoned it in as a take-out order."

"This guys was asking if they had cinnamon, and the barrista said no, but they did have cocoa powder. Are these things interchangeable now?"

The somewhat pathetic thing is that we continue to visit the cafe. Sometimes I lapse back into good faith and give the cafe another chance, like I did this morning. Everyone likes the idea of a latte in the morning, right? Well, *I *do, and I try to reserve the habit as a special treat for times when I arrive at work really early. Foamy, milky coffee drinks are good for writers. So this morning I decided to give the cafe the benefit of the doubt and get myself a little working writer's breakfast.

There was, amazingly, no line at the counter. Understand that this cafe has the worst feng shui *ever*--there's no clear place for a line to form, so when there's a throng of mocha-thirsty stroller moms, they all hang out in this inpenetrable blob. Walking in to the absence of stroller moms was encouraging.

I ordered a medium latte and a muffin to go. The barrista, a somewhat fey and dim boy who's ultimatel good-natured, rang up my order. The total seemed low, but the total fluxuates depending on what the staff discount happens to be that day (the cafe management can't seem to make up their mind about it.) Plus I'm a decent tipper, so sometimes the barristas give me a pretty good kick back.

In the middle of processing my change, the barrista announced that he'd forgotten to clock in. Then he handed me my drink--with no muffin, mind you--and immediately helped the next dude in line, so it would have been rude at that point to interrupt them. I considered grabbing a muffin myself, but it occured to me that the barrista never rang it up. Once he'd finished the next transaction, I asked the barrista this.

"Oh, no," he said casually, and then returned to swabbing the counter with a sodden towel.

I'll probably visit the cafe again--after a few weeks, I'll forgive them for their incompetence, and their fancy coffee drinks are acceptable enough to semi-justify it. But there's a larger function of the cafe: it's a harmless thing for everyone to gripe about. It's the common ground of all employees here, our own "what do you think of this weather?" We may sometimes be disgruntled about how things function at our company, but we'll always share the joy of knowing we're not as badly off as the cafe.