Stupid Things Customers Say

[source]

One of the entertaining things about working at a cafe, is the constant flow of drivel that comes out of some customers mouthes. Sometimes I find myself thinking how I should be annoyed at what they've said, rather than impressed with just how idiotic they seem to be. During our end of day close sometimes the ladies I work with and myself like to incorporate silly things said during the day into our conversations. Over the weekend a man was a little taken back by the $4 price for a large coffee and claimed that he could 'go up to Coles and get a whole tin of coffee for $1.79 and it would be just as good'. I thought this was going to be the weekend winner, but on Sunday afternoon as I was just about to close the coffee machine down a lady bustled into the cafe hysterically claiming she needed a coffee. She needed a small decaf latte. She was quite infuriating to serve because she choose to stare at me rather than answer questions, and when I charged her out she  challenged the price. When I told her that decaf was 50 cents extra, she picked up her coffees and sassed, 'of course the less you get the more you pay'. So.. I'm pretty sure she doesn't understand that decaf is a different blend and that we don't actually knit pick the caffeine out ourselves. 

After working in hospitality it has really made me think twice about my own dinning experiences. And think about what I ask and say before it leaves my mouth. Because if you give yourself an extra twenty seconds to possibly observe the environment, you may save yourself the hassle of asking stupid questions such as, 'do you guys sell coffee?'. Yes! Yes we do, it is a cafe after all. And, 'do you do takeaway coffees?' as they stand in front of a stack of takeaway cups. After a year and half of working at the cafe, I have heard some pretty silly things, but my most favourite thing that was said recently to one of the other waitresses was by a couple of middle aged women. Sarah seated the ladies and told them it was table service but they chose to come up to the counter anyway after being seated and asked if they could get things off the menu cheaper if they didn't utilise our table service. 

Sometimes there are days where I'll have a handful of people come in throughout the day and say equally silly things that really makes me worry. I would never, ever go into a cafe or an establishment and ask the staff things like 'have you considered how this cafe is contributing to the obesity epidemic? If you put that much food on someones plate, they're going to eat it'. That was last week's gem, and the most concerning thing about the way the conversation played out was the lady who asked me this was deadly serious and genuinely annoyed with how much food came out on her plate because she left the cafe the day before feeling too full and unable to eat her dinner that night. All you can really do is laugh I suppose. 

Working Together

[My friend Jamie took this photo]

A couple of weeks ago Luke left the restaurant he was working at to explore different options and has been working at the cafe where I work for the past couple of weeks. Which has been such a great change considering we actually get to see each other now! Before where Luke was working he would work all day, and finish in the evenings sometimes just before 11pm. Aside from a rushed break in the afternoon, we only got to spend time together if I stayed up late to see him after work which was becoming a problem as I start work early. Or Sunday evenings when his restaurant was closed. Our days off always fell on different days, and until recently we hadn't spent a full day together in three months. And this has been our routine for the past couple of years. Having him home in the evenings has been a delightful adjustment, and I now actually get to enjoy the benefits of having a chef as a husband! 

Weird Customers

This has been an incredibly weird couple of weeks. I've noticed that in my every day-to-day life that there will be intensely hectic periods that last a couple of weeks. And then there are weeks so tiresome a month rolls by without anything to write home about.

Last week I met some incredibly weird characters,  and some wonderfully weird ones. I met a man who was convinced travelling was hocus pocus and that paradise was in front of him. A senior citizen offended by icing sugar. A young man who had his right arm amputated as a baby, and had had the amputated arm tattooed with a giant fingernail so his arm looked like an enormous finger. A man who hates the sound of coffee being made. The funniest elderly man who explicitly hates mushrooms and had happened to of seen an Australian film that my boss had one line in when she did acting as a younger woman. He pointed my boss out at the cafe and cited her line! A man who doesn't eat because he was bitten by a spider. A middle aged (Twins Peak looking) man with no teeth who tries to sell packets of floral sheets for $12 that he carries around with him everywhere. A compulsive journal writer who comes to the cafe and leaves her journal open while she goes to the bathroom and has been known to leave entries on the table. An extremely rude man who just about refused to sit down because he felt table service was not a successful way to run a business. A couple who cut each others meals into bit sized pieces and held hands while they fed each other. And this is just the list that I can remember.

For the past two weeks at work something odd has happened, it is almost as if the universe is shinning a big full moon this way and making everybody around here act odd. However, something awful did happen a couple of days ago that has a strangely fantastic end result. But more on that later.