jack-of-none:

ancamnarvienn:

funereal-disease:

havingbeenbreathedout:

Sometimes I think back on the time I spent working as a barista, and it seems SO STRANGE to me that “coffee shop AU” has become synonymous with narratives that are low on conflict, high on wholesome romance. During the year I spent working at a coffee shop:

• A coworker of mine took a bunch of psychedelics, walked through some strangers’ plate-glass door, and threatened them with a bowie knife, leading to his arrest and imprisonment (and, needless to say, a late opening for the coffee shop that morning). 
• Another coworker, an ex-military type with a young wife and a new baby, decided to smoke up for the first time ever with two other mutual coworkers, in the back of one of their trucks; and ended up having a three-way with them which ended his marriage. 
• I had a nervous breakdown, stopped being able to eat food or hold conversations, and ended up sleeping on my coworker’s couch for three weeks before she finally called my parents to come collect me.
• Multiple store managers were fired for embezzlement. (Reminder: this was within the space of a single year.)
• Yet another coworker, who was seventeen at the time, started dog-sitting for a couple of regulars in their (I’m guessing) early 50s, and ended up in an ongoing creepy and incidentally illegal ~relationship~ with them both. 
• Various employees discovered, in the course of cleaning the bathrooms: couples fucking in the bathrooms; junkies passed out in the bathrooms; drunks puking in the bathrooms; both adults and children weeping in the bathrooms; a woman bleeding all over the bathroom from a gash in her throat (??); a dude standing in the middle of the bathroom floor and pissing in the opposite direction from the toilet, so that when the employee opened the unlocked door she got piss all over her (????). 
• The owner of the bridal shop across the street was exposed as both abusive toward her employees and also cooking the books, which led to my coffee shop taking on a couple of untrained and weirdly conservative bridal shop workers for a few months while the bridal shop was shuttered and sold to new owners. Later the larcenous former bridal shop owner came down with some horrible disease which caused her to lose both her hands.  
• There was a regular universally referred to as “Sketchy Steve,” who came in at 7am for a three-shot latte with room for Seagrams 7, and dealt drugs to all us baristas. I actually, at one point (I cannot believe I was this stupid), went inside Sketchy Steve’s house, and allowed him to spend like half an hour showing me his collection of découpaged outlet plates and also soliciting me for sex while I uncomfortably yet studiously declined.
• Right before I started, the store manager had walked off the job in the middle of a shift, and ¾ of the employees had walked out after him. None of them ever returned. 

Like, working on the front lines of food service was the most operatically sordid professional experience I have ever had, and one of the most surreal; and it is hilarious to me that THAT, of all jobs, is the one that has come to stand for soft-focus domestic romance in fandom circles. 

reblogging for “operatically sordid” 

Ditto.

i also work as a barista and here are some anecdotes for you

– A woman was banned from the store for peeing on one of our chairs. She sneaked back into the store to pee on another chair in retaliation

– On my second day a car burst into flames in the parking lot. nobody ever claimed the car

– I wasn’t at work when this happened thankfully but at one point an unidentified woman became violently ill in our bathroom, vomiting up what the janitor described to me as “blood and chunks of flesh” before passing out on the floor

– An old man followed me around the store while I was on break and attempted to convince me to run away to Las Vegas with him

– Things we have discovered in our restroom: a large purple double dildo, porn magazines that had been viciously ripped apart, a pair of white boxer-briefs smeared with blood and feces, about 50 business cards for someone’s “freelance sorcerer” career

– One time a chipmunk got into the store, and we barricaded it into a closet and sent someone to get a live trap. The head manager at the time, who was a soulless asshole and also very stupid, then spent upwards of half an hour attempting to kill the chipmunk by smashing it with a mallet, ignoring the increasingly desperate objections of the cafe staff. Luckily the chipmunk was too fast for him and we eventually caught it in the live trap to be freed at a local nature park

– On Craigslist Missed Connections i discovered an anonymous man posting incessantly about another customer’s pantyhose. The contents of his posts made it clear that he was a regular, and also that he was jerking off in the cafe somewhere. We never caught him. 

–