It’s November 21st. This is the sound of me having a decaf oat milk latte and a cinnamon roll at Urban Health, the café and juice bar down the block from my house. €6.85 paid on my credit card because for some reason I still haven’t been paid my stipend and it’s the weekend so I won’t be able to talk to anyone about it until Monday. Though I’m confident by the time this hits your ears I’ll have muscled my way into the money I am owed so no need to worry.
To-go coffee cups have this almost mythical quality to me. It’s their standardized commodity appearance, their ritual ubiquity as an unspoken class identifier for desk-job urbanites, the everyday decadence of packaging such a complicated and distant commodity as coffee in a composite paper cup, destined for landfill from its manufacture, with a plastic sippy-cup lid. There are people out there who get a 3.50 to-go coffee every day on their way into work. There are even those that come back for a second cup in the afternoon, as a “pick-me-up.”
I have this hang-up about becoming a regular at any given café. As soon as I see a barista enough times for them to recognize me, to ask me how I’ve been rather than how I am, I have this compulsion to sever ties and find a new place. Having worked several café and food service jobs, I know what regulars are like from the other side. The woman who is somehow always on a frustrating business call when she comes in, the man who orders $3 toast with vegemite every day for his breakfast, the customer who supervises you as you spread jalapeño cream cheese on their salt bagel to make sure you do it right, and the endless Chase Bank employees filtering across Madison Avenue in identical branded fleece vests and light blue button downs, paying with identical corporate AMEX cards. To become a regular, to me, is to proclaim that coffee isn’t a treat or a splurge, but an entitlement, something essential to an aspirational class lifestyle.
There’s a sign that’s been stuck to Urban Health’s front window for the past couple of months advertising openings for barista and kitchen staff. I walk by that sign every other day heading to the grocery store and each time I have this little back and forth about whether I should apply. My absurd worry is that denying Urban Health my labor is some kind of class traitor move, that food service has always been the work people pay me for and, degree or not, my refusal is a declaration that I’m too good to work with my hands, that I’m above pulling espresso shots and smashing avocado, that I belong on the other side of the counter in the realm of the regulars – worse that I’m buying into the fiction that I’ve somehow “done my time” as if food service is just a step on the ladder.
The truth is that I love making things for others, cooking and serving food, paid or unpaid, is one of the most intimate kinds of work you can do and I often find myself in line for a café wishing I could pop behind the counter to steam some milk, pour a few drinks to put the feeling back in my body. The thing that keeps me from going back to the familiar stability of a coffee job isn’t the manual labor, but the way that labor is detached from its inherent intimacy, that when you’re behind the counter you’re not an individual feeding another individual, your time and your body are not your own. It doesn’t matter to the ownership how deeply you connect with people beyond the fact that it keeps folks coming back, your pay stays the same and they people stay customers. It’s the restraints of those times when the café is empty but you can’t read or write or sit down or even talk too much, just tidy up and wait for the next customer to arrive or for your shift to end, whichever comes first. That’s the difference between the work I’m trying to do here and a coffee job: At a café I’m just body behind a counter, a labor expense on a spreadsheet, despite the inherent intimacy of food service. but here, whispering in your ear, I’m an individual; someone with a unique perspective and specific capabilities looking for connection and a little bit of compensation.
Thank you for listening, and thank you for your help.
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