Sorry, You Were Out

Your parcel will arrive between 1am and 11pm tomorrow, probably, as long as tomorrow is not the day you asked us to come. Before our drivers set out they must consult the oracle, to be certain that the omens are favourable. If the eagle flies on the left, you will find a ‘sorry, you were out card’ even though you were in, even though you were staring at the driveway all morning to make sure you didn’t miss them. If the eagle flies on the right, then your parcel, which could fit quite comfortably through your letterbox, will be redirected to a depot 374 miles away from your house, only accessible by donkey on a Thursday at low tide. If the eagle is, in fact, a falcon, then your parcel will simply cease to exist and will be sent to the same final resting place as lost socks and hairclips. 

Of course we can redeliver. Of course. But under no circumstances to a more convenient address, or at a time, god forbid, that suits you. I’m sure you understand. You first need to locate the unique 82-character tracking code that we issue by smoke signal before the morning fog has lifted. We estimate that your parcel will arrive at the moment you start shampooing your hair and our driver, oblivious to your pleas for mercy, will leave just as you skid down the stairs, towel barely covering your wobbly bits.

Our dedicated customer service helpline is run by our very own terrorist cell. Every minute you spend on hold to them donates £5.87 to their quest to eradicate good sense from the world. As a special bonus, if you wait more than five minutes, they will detonate a stupidity bomb on Westminster, or on that bit of the internet below news stories. On reaching our call centre, your complaint will automatically be transferred to a representative who doesn’t speak your language.

Thank you for choosing us to deliver your parcel. Our mission is to make things as difficult for you as possible. After all, it’s not like you’ve got anything better to do.

Checking My Checking (Or, OCD And Me)

It’s been a long time since my last post (I know, I know, I’m sorry). To summarise the last year in some brief bullet points:

• I worked in an office, but still spent a lot of time in coffee shops
• I got engaged (wheee!)
• I applied for a PhD
• I stopped working in the aforementioned office and now work in another office, but still spend a lot of time in coffee shops
• I was accepted to study for a PhD (yay!), but am so far not having much luck with the whole ‘securing funding’ thing (boo!)

I will address all of these things in time, you lucky things. But today I’d like to talk about this completely non-coffee-shop-related bullet point:

• I took steps to sort out my OCD and was mostly successful

I came out about my OCD on Facebook yesterday, because this ‘article’ has been doing the rounds. Quite apart from the fact that it’s badly written (what on earth is a ‘twerk’ of personality supposed to be? It sounds painful), it’s also just plain wrong. These pictures, whilst amusing, and the feelings of annoyance and general WTFery that they provoke have almost nothing to do with OCD. I had a bit of a paddy about it and subsequently received lots of very nice comments, but also a few questions, which I thought I’d do my best to answer here. They can be categorised pretty much as follows:

a) Are you alright?!

b) Really? I never even realised you had OCD…

c) So what actually is it if it’s not all colour-coded pencils?

d) I think I/my friend has the same problem, what should I/they do?

So, here goes.

Life After the Coffee Shop

It has been over a month since I last posted, which is rather shameful really. The reason for this is that I took the rather risky decision to hand in my notice at the shop and take my chances among the ranks of the unemployed.

As it turns out, it was a rather good move - I emerged blinking in the sunlight and was unemployed for a grand total of four days before the temping agency I'd signed up with came up trumps and had me placed in an office job.

Yes, I have sold my soul a little bit, but they're a nice bunch and I still have access to all the tea and hot chocolate I can manage, along with a fair few cakes, so not much has changed really.

If I'm being honest, I'm not exactly sure what it is I'm supposed to be doing because my job description's rather vague; I've mastered the art of 'looking terribly busy', which seems to be about all you need to get by in an office environment and it certainly seems to be doing the trick - everyone's been telling me how well I'm doing, so I must be doing something right. Apart from that, it's all databases and emails and occasionally researching statistics about potholes (don't ask). I do a lot of filing - or at least, I'm handed pieces of paper that I don't really understand, and I separate them from kith and kin with cardboard dividers and put them into ringbound concentration camps (occasionally I torture them further by putting them through the binding machine, how cruel), blindly following the instructions of my predecessor, who's off on maternity leave.

The boss likes me because I always pop my head around his door to see if he wants a cuppa whenever I'm on my way to fetch myself one. It seems to make him very happy, and I like to be nice to people who are giving me money, just in case they change their mind about it all.

I, in return, have my evenings and weekends back for the first time in about three years. I can't understand why people get so depressed about Monday mornings - I'm still reeling from the delight of having had two whole days off in a row (though I suspect this novelty will wear off fairly soon).

It seems like an excellent arrangement, really. I was even hired on the understanding that I'm not hugely interested in carving out a career in the sector and am actually planning on buggering off back to academia as soon as possible, so it's not like I've completely sold out. I hope.

So, I suppose I am now The Office Temping Graduate technically - though I still spend an inordinate amount of my time in coffee shops (firmly on the other side of the counter). The blog will definitely continue - if only to unleash the rest of my menagerie of weird and wonderful former customers - but there might be a few more spreadsheets than before.

Coffee Shop Etiquette, Lesson 1: Put Your @#$£ing Phone Down

Sometimes, I consider wearing a t-shirt under my work shirt, so that I could pull my work shirt over my head, like a footballer celebrating a goal, to reveal the following emblazoned on my chest:

I am not a lip reader.
I am not psychic.
Put down your @#?!ing phone and TALK TO ME.

It would, admittedly, have to be a pretty big t-shirt.

People who refuse to halt a phone conversation for long enough to place an order for a coffee will be among the first to be exiled when I am finally proclaimed Queen of the Universe.

Picture, if you will, the following conversation:

"Hi, what can I get you?"

"..."

"Right. Drink in or take away?"

"..."

"Ok. Black or white?"

"..."

"Got it. Decaf?  Soya? Single shot? Hot milk? Cold milk?"

"..."

You get the idea. Ordering a coffee is a (relatively) simple process when both parties are paying attention; when one of them is miming their order because they're too pig-headed to put their fucking phone down it's a nightmare. It's like charades at Christmas with auntie Mabel after a few too many sherries, except you're auntie Mabel; baffled, irritated and wishing all these idiots would leave you alone so you could just go back to bed.

The other day, my colleague and I had to deal with a particularly bad example of such a customer. My colleague, an extraordinarily level-headed lady, had managed, via the medium of interpretive dance, to extract two vital bits of information out of the customer (double espresso, drink in), whose conversation was evidently so scintillating ("oh, yah. Yah. Yah. Really? Yah...") that it precluded a 2 minute break to order a coffee. My colleague, quite affronted by the customer's rudeness,  left her to it while she made the coffee, came back, placed it on the counter in front of her and, realising that the customer still wasn't paying any attention,  did something I've never seen her do before.

She completely ignored the customer.

We went about serving everyone else in the queue,  loaded up the dishwasher, restocked the teabags - and the customer was STILL at the counter, STILL on her phone ("yah. Yah."), her coffee completely untouched. She flagged down my colleague,  mouthed "soya milk" at her, and my colleague duly obliged,  bringing over a jug of hot soya milk.

"NO - cold!" snapped the customer, placing her hand over the mouthpiece and rolling her eyes as if my colleague was behaving like some kind of idiot. I half expected my colleague to pour the cold soya milk over the customer's head when she returned with it, so furious was her expression,  but to her credit she poured it in the cup, only lingering a fraction too long after the customer's 'stop' gesture.

We ignored her for a good couple of minutes more before - still on her phone - the customer waved us over with the universal 'bill' gesture (scribbling-in-mid-air, surely soon to be replaced by jabbing-at-imaginary-chip-and-pin-machine). I rang it through the till and pointed to the total on the screen, wordlessly. The customer paid (eventually - it's much harder to rummage through your purse when you're gripping your phone between chin and shoulder) and, finally, sat down, her coffee surely long-cold.

She never once put her phone down, and then had the gall to interrupt me while I was talking to another customer (who was not on their phone) to ask for the WiFi password. There's just no helping some people.

Next time, I'll just wear the t-shirt.

Statistics: A Lesson in Bending the Truth

It's fair to say I've been a bit depressed this week.

On Monday, I graduated. Wizard robes, processions, fanfares - the whole shebang. My classmates and I braved it through the snow to be reunited for one last, glorious hurrah: and, I'm pleased to report, not one of us fell over on stage.

It was lovely, even with the bum-numbingly long running time and and the stinging palms associated with clapping almost continuously for an hour and a half (everyone received a strictly rationed 5 claps from me; only 3 if they received a whoop from the audience or waved like a twit on stage). But somewhere in the midst of all the rhetoric and speechifying, I began to feel uncomfortable. Our university, the principal assured us and our assembled well-wishers, is one of the best in the country for graduate employment rates. Within 6 months of graduation, around 90% of us will be employed.

Well, alright, I thought. But 6 months is a long time. If I haven't found a job after 6 months, I'll probably start panicking. I reckon by that time, if I continue at my current rate, I'll have applied for around 60 jobs (and only have been interviewed for 9 of them). Someone will take pity on me, surely. Surely.

The bit that really concerned me about this statistic, though, was the glossing over of exactly what these graduates are doing. When I filled in my graduate census a little while after finishing my BA, I was a university statistician's wet dream - not only was I employed (in a bar - I think I entered my job title as 'beverage technician'), but I was going on to further study. Double whammy. Two thumbs up. This time, filling in my postgrad census, I'll be able to tick the 'full-time employment' box, but my degrees will have nothing to do with it at all. I am one of the 90%. What a terrifying thought.

So, on Monday, I graduated. On Tuesday I was back to making coffee. I am one of the 90%.

My Favourite Customers #2: The Artist

Ah, la vie bohѐme. To spend your nights in dingy jazz bars and your days combining your two greatest passions: classic steam trains and naked women.

Well, that's what the Artist does, anyway.

The Artist is in his seventies and comes to the shop a couple of times a week to dip his straggly moustache in a black coffee. We met when he asked me to give a colleague a sketch she had inspired. It was a female figure in black, striding across an orgiastic landscape of shadowy figures. She wasn't too taken with it, and it remains rolled up in the office. I actually quite like it.

Since then, I've been privy to the contents of his sketchbook a few times. It runs something like this: train, boobies, train, boobies, train, head and shoulders sketch of me from behind at the coffee machine, train, boobies (not mine). The absence of my boobies from his sketchpad is a continual source of sadness to the Artist. It's not for lack of trying on his part, though. Unlike a lot of the other customers I deal with on a daily basis, he makes no secret about the importance of my booby ownership to our relationship. He showed me the sketch he had intended me to pose for him: a naked woman on a dystopian backdrop, pointing a gun down the page. It was pretty good. Maybe I should have said yes. I could have been the Kate to his disturbed old Leo.

Even though his objectification of women should offend my feminist soul, I actually rather like the Artist. He's always very well-behaved when he talks to my other (female) colleagues - he just happens to know that I have a relatively high tolerance of bawdy. He is probably the only person I know who is permanently grumpier than I am. My favourite question to ask him is "how was your day?" because it has always, always been bad - "I fell over/a mirror fell on my head/I ate a cake and it kept me awake until 4am". He is, however, in spite of his prickly demeanour, occasionally very sweet: he remembers just about every conversation we've ever had, despite his insistence that his memory has begun to fail him - once, my colleague mentioned in passing that she was interested in glass blowing and the following week he stopped at the shop just to drop off an article about classes that he had cut out of a magazine for her.

The Artist may only like me for my boobies, but at least he's honest about it.

Sometimes, I Wish I Wasn't English

Of the (many) things I hate about my job, the following exchange is probably the worst.

INTERIOR: A busy coffee shop. The baristas flit about. The Grad is collecting dirty plates. She reaches the table of an Old English Bloke.

OLD ENGLISH BLOKE: I must say, it's nice to finally find someone here who speaks English!

THE GRAD: (coldly) All of my colleagues speak English. (She sweeps away, her dramatic point probably undermined by tripping over something.)

I get terribly, terribly cross about this sort of attitude. My colleagues over the last year and a bit have come form every imaginable corner of the globe; from Italy, Spain, Hungary, Lithuania, Romania, Israel, Brazil - even Scotland (hohoho). All of them have been wonderful. All of them speak English (even the Scot, hohoho). All of them have encountered someone like the bloke above - usually an older, white, middle-class Daily Mail reader (let's not mince words here) who assumes that they're lazy or stupid because they weren't born on this sceptred isle.

I get cross because this kind of assumption isn't made about me. I've got an English accent, so instead I get the conspiratorial eye-roll, the "these Johnny foreigners, eh?" look, as if I, too, as a right-minded English person, must be sick of working with these simpletons.

Well, I'm not. I don't share your views, and I will set you straight if you dare to vocalise them in front of me. My colleagues are bloody marvellous. They're smart. They're interesting. They're brave. How many times have you, oh Daily Mail reader, moved to a completely alien place and taken a job that requires you to speak a foreign language all day? Because they do, you know. Behind the counter, in the staff room, everyone speaks English, even when they are with colleagues from the same country. It's an unspoken rule at our shop. We can all speak English, so we all do. We include everyone.

Sometimes, when I'm working on the shop floor by myself, I fantasise about adopting a foreign language for the duration of the shift. Not because I want the Daily Mail readers to think that I'm lazy or stupid, but because I don't want them to think that I am anything like them.

I don't, though. I am not brave enough to be a stranger in London.