(Practically) 127 hours (of serving coffee)

I’m writing this during my measly break from my second 14 hour shift in a row. And my god, do I need to vent (more). So, I’m me; you’re the worst customer in the world. Right. Here we go.

When I ask if you would like your coffee in the shop or to take away, please god stop replying that, well, you’d like to have it here but in a take away cup, har har, like that’s some kind of radical life choice. You are not thinking outside the box.

Also, you are not special just because I remembered your order. I remember all the orders, so stop it with the insincerely self-deprecating oh-I-must-be-one-of-the-most-regular-customers laugh. You’re not.

Another thing you’ve got to stop doing is telling stupid stories about how much you need to use the bathroom/have lots of change and your purse is so heavy/are so tired and just can’t function without an extra shot in your coffee today giggle giggle shut up.

Next thing. Don’t order something and then immediately ask how much it is, before I could conceivably have told you. I PROMISE I HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN THAT PART OF THE PROCESS.

And while I’m yelling, WHY ARE YOU ASKING IF THIS SKINNY LATTE IS YOURS? You ordered a skinny latte and then I said “skinny latte” in a loud voice while holding this very one and there is no one else around?!?!

The bathroom. Christ alive, the bathroom. If you’ve just walked in off the street and you need to go, that’s fine; just ask. Do not: walk straight past me and ignore me when I say hello, for I am the keeper of the entry code, and I will not give it to you. Also do not: swear blind that you come in here all the time, you promise. What, do you think I’ve never been here, my workplace, before? I know all the customers who come here all the time. Liars don’t get the code.

Finally, these are the customers who are my friends:

• Fiona and Peter,
• Rich,
• cappuccino man from the weekends,
• that cute blond Australian guy,
• the lady with the two golden retrievers who gave me a hug one time when I was stressed.

If you are not one of these people (and especially if you are that Spanish lady with all the kids, or the weird soy milk woman), remember that I give special treatment at my convenience. Stop being so damn friendly.

Aaaand I feel so much better now. Thanks.

In which I like things

I have heard many times (I’m looking at you, sis) that I am too cynical and too opinionated and do I actually like anything enough not to make a sarcastic comment about it?

Well excuuuse me, I usually reply, but how is having opinions a bad thing? And cynicism is just being analytical, don’tchaknow? But yes, ACtually, I do love making sarcastic comments above most other things.

But today I’m feeling uncharacteristically cheery, so here is an illustrated list of some things I do like. Slash usually don’t snark at.

Running in the rain. Running in the sunshine. Running in the snow. Running fast, running slowly. Races. Training. Buying new running gear. Waiting for the new issue of Runner’s World. Race t-shirts. Medals.

The satisfaction of having remembered to buy a new bottle of shampoo/shower gel/toothpaste before the old one runs out.

Opening a new book. Closing the back cover when you’ve finished. Reading something that so clearly expresses that thing you’ve thought all along. The smug feeling I get from my tower of books.

Correctly guessing what an advert’s for.

Newsnight.

Advice columns. Etiquette columns. Gossip websites.

When my mum sends me funny postcards.

Tennis players’ non-racket hand in photos.

BBC sports montages. Sue Barker.

People asking me things they assume I’ll know. Replying with the correct answer and an exasperated God, obviously. Or if I don’t know, getting to reply with an equally exasperated God, why do you ask me everything? Have you never heard of Google?

And cheese.

True story!

They say you should write what you know. Accordingly, when I was a student, I wrote about literary theory and academic grandiloquence, because this was what I encountered every day.

But alas, I am no longer a student, and have ceased seeing everything in terms of a dialectic which must be blogged about in a moderately amusing way. And alack, none of my education seems to have qualified me for an occupation which would otherwise inspire my writing. No, these days, I am (still) a barista, heaven help me. And not only have I stopped learning anything new, every cappuccino seems to drain me of the knowledge I spent so much money to obtain.

But don’t despair! I have at length hit upon a subject which I know inside out: the horrible things customers do in coffee shops. I’m aware I’ve broached this topic before, but I’m confident I can squeeze a few hundred more words from it, which is the main thing. So, imagine you are the type of (snobby, Tory, Kensington-based) coffee-drinker I serve on a daily basis. If you want your barista to be unfailingly nice to you, here is a list of things you should never do.

Number 1: Don’t tell her that it doesn’t take a genius to do her job. Just be content that you are more successful than she is. No need to rub it in. It doesn’t take a genius to work it out.

Number 2: If you bring children with you, keep them quiet. At least apologise if one of them vomits. Definitely don’t expect your barista to keep an eye on them while you pop to the shops. The above points also apply to the old and senile.

Number 3: Please don’t assume that because your barista is the only British member of staff, she will agree with your racist rants about her Polish and Slovakian colleagues. She is not a pushover, and she will ask you to leave. And then throw away the Daily Mail you leave behind.

Number 4: Regular customers: sometimes, your barista just wants to make your coffee and send you on your way, without having the usual conversation about your book/holiday/baby. Don’t take it personally, and next time you come in, please don’t passive-aggressively change your usual order after she’s already made it just to punish her.

Number 5: Please notice that there is a bin in the bathroom. So don’t put used toilet paper on the floor, or Burger King wrappers down the toilet. Correspondingly, there is also a toilet in the bathroom, so don’t shit in the bin.

Eat around the meat?

A couple of months ago, I made the decision to become a vegetarian. This was prompted by an article by Victoria Coren, about comments made by some chef or other. Said chef had suggested that, ethically, there is no difference between eating a cow and eating a puppy. Concludes Coren, “The better logic is not: “If you eat a sheep, you could eat a puppy”, but: “If you couldn’t eat a puppy, you shouldn’t eat a sheep.”

As you might have noticed, my memory of the decision-making process is a bit hazy, but this last bit stuck in my mind enough to make me think twice the next time a ham sandwich crossed my path. And then I dreamt someone was force-feeding me sausage meat, and lo, a vegetarian was created.

But it turns out that Christmas isn’t the best time to make this decision. I arrived home to be told that, besides turkey and (suet-based) pastry dishes, the menu for the Christmas week included chicken, chilli con carne, fish pie, and sausages. And to see this notice:

Vegetables it is, then.

On my conversion to the religion of Roger Federer

I’ve been a tennis fan for years, and take every opportunity to see live matches. Until this week, however, I’d never had the opportunity to see Roger Federer play live.

Federer, obviously, needs no introduction. He is, we are told, the greatest player of all time, a living legend blessed with supernatural grace, speed, and precision. He’s contributed a huge amount to the sport, through his rivalry with Rafael Nadal, and his affability and modesty. Everyone loves him.

The thing is, though, I’ve never been much of a Federer fan. His subtlety and serenity were always a bit lost on me. When deciding who to support, I tend towards extroversion and drama in both play and personality, and I prefer to watch a hard-fought, grinding match than a flawless but one-sided display of the kind Federer so often produces. My love for Nadal, for example, was cemented during his five-set marathon against Robert Kendrick at Wimbledon 2006, a thriller of a match during which Nadal battled against the odds to win from two sets down for only the second time in his career.

So when I found out that I would be lucky enough see a Nadal-Federer match this week, I knew who I would be supporting. All weekend, I bored my friends and colleagues with my over-excited nonsense. I cheered and squealed as Nadal came on court. The stage was set for what I was sure would be a classic match, close and dramatic, with Nadal, of course, as the eventual victor.

A classic it was not; Nadal never had a chance. But far from being disappointed, I experienced a revelation, one which everyone else had years ago: Roger Federer is a tennis player of devastating genius. Within two games, all my fervor for Nadal had evaporated. I hardly noticed him during the hour the match lasted; he was reduced to little more than the wall against which Federer could practice his breathtaking single-handed backhand. Federer covered the whole court without ever seeming to move, he hit astonishing angles with even more astonishing frequency, and all the while his hair swished gracefully as though he was in a L’Oreal advert. It was as though I finally fully understood all the praise directed at Federer; I have never seen tennis so captivating or beautiful. As Nadal graciously admitted after the match, only Federer can play like that.

Unfortunately, I’m a bit late to the party. But like his career so far, Federer’s autumn years will surely be incomparable to anyone else’s.

A musing about life…

Why isn’t my life more like a movie? I’d be cast as the cool, quirky one because I have short hair and a tattoo. It would be the story of three friends living together in London and trying to get their lives together after graduation. They’d have to take a variety of underpaid jobs, and hilarity would ensue. Followed, of course, by fairy tale endings for all.

For example, if I have to work in a coffee shop, why haven’t I been asked out yet by a cute regular customer? You know who you are, cappuccino man and guy-from-the-estate-agent-over-the-road. And why has the editor of a national newspaper not taken a liking to me based on my superior milk-frothing technique and deduced that I would make an excellent tennis correspondent?

Come on, life, get it together.

[Insert mandatory blog post about blogging itself]

Lately, my blog has been undergoing a bit of an identity crisis. An existential crisis, if you’ll permit me the first of several pretentions (does a blog continue to exist if no one contributes to it?)

I’ve always been a bit unsure about my premise: “this blog is the place I keep all my thoughts about the things I read”. Coherent? Original? Ha. My favourite blogs, like this one and this one, have an actual point, which keeps the blogger and the readers interested. My irregular rants about this and that don’t exactly give the same incentive for anyone to keep reading.

And then there’s the issue of seriousness. Others among my favourite blogs, like this one and this one, are light-hearted and entertaining. Nothing about my blog is light-hearted: it’s grey, there are no pictures, and the name is a not-very-good play on the title of a novel by the generally-quite-serious Marquez. But then again, I like grey, I love Marquez, and I have the pretentious idea that pictures distract from the Serious Point I’m making. I’m torn between this desire to make my blog more like one I would actually read, and my need to always be making a serious point.

This is a preoccupation which permeates a lot of my online interactions. I even find myself using facebook less and less, because I don’t want acquaintances to look me up and conclude from the frequency of my facebooking that I don’t have a real life. Therefore, I tend to reduce my facebooking to the posting of snarky statuses. Hence, the aforementioned acquaintances searching for me (of which I’m sure there are many) will judge from the infrequency of my posts that I have an exciting life outside of facebook, and from the hilarity that ensues when I do update my status, that I’m a fun person. I’m therefore very picky about my snarky status updates: I generally only post one if I think it’s funny enough that at least five people will like it.

Before you ask, I’m very aware that this policy makes me look like a colossal dick, and that any casual observer would see right through it anyway. But I justify it to myself thus: I once read a tweet that said twitter is the digital equivalent of muttering to yourself. Well, I don’t really go in for muttering to myself, but I do have a pretty good line in snarky comments. Therefore, my profile is a decent representation of myself. Ditto for my blog: I’m not very good at being light-hearted, but sometimes I have something to say, and I like people to know it.

My natural tendency would be to situate this discovery within a “larger point”, but I don’t really seem to have one.

What are the prospects for the “graduate with no future”?

Dipping my toes as I am in the shallows of the job market, I thought it was high time to write about the difficulties facing graduates at the moment. Although, come to think of it, the metaphor is hardly a good one, the pool of jobs being somewhat depleted these days. But nevertheless, I live in the hope that one day I’ll be able to embark on the voyage of a Proper Career.

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of articles about young people struggling to find jobs. There are the school leavers forced out of education because they can’t manage without EMA, but unable to find a job because they don’t have enough qualifications; the graduate who has applied for 836 jobs; the intern expected to work for free at an anti-slavery charity. It’s easy to dismiss these stories as extreme examples, but the truth is, they’re pretty commonplace. Since graduating, I’ve applied for about 30 jobs, and I haven’t heard anything; and it’s no wonder, when some of the ads attracted nearly 100 applications each. To pay the bills and my loans, I’ve recently taken a job managing a coffee shop, which is hardly going to make use of my degrees in literature. Just this week, my flatmate, who is a qualified architect, speaks four languages, and is studying for a masters, quit her unpaid internship when she was asked to clean the toilet.

I came across an interesting phrase the other day: as Paul Mason of the BBC noted earlier this year, the “graduate with no future” is emerging as a new sociological category. The UK’s universities are churning out more graduates than ever before, many of whom are struggling to find employment which makes use of the skills they spent thousands to attain. At the moment, I seem to be firmly stuck in this category, and, like so many others, I being confronted with the stark truth that in the current climate, there are simply not enough jobs for us all.

Putting the political aspects of the situation to one side, I wonder what the sociological implications will be? The fate of the “graduate with no future” is unlikely to improve when the economy finally picks up. Even in a wildly optimistic vision of the future, in which the amount of graduate positions each year is equal to the amount of graduates, who can guarantee that employers will look kindly on those who have been out of university for a few years but haven’t been able to gather any professional experience outside of Macdonalds? (Or in my case, coffee chains. Sigh.)

Previous generations of graduates have had, if not a job for life, at least the prospect of a steady career path and progression. It is on this schema that the usual life plan was formulated: house ownership, marriage and children all depend on the confidence in the future that the expectation of a steady career provides. Many of today’s graduates, forced by student debt and limited job opportunities to accept any job that comes along, there is little confidence in the prospect of a career. Planning for the future is therefore all but impossible. Who can say when the job market will pick up? Or if we will ever be able to break into our desired fields? And further in the future, who among us can even begin to imagine buying a home, getting married, or starting a family? Although the country’s economic prospects will eventually improve, this generation of graduates with no future will probably be marked, financially, professionally and personally, for a long time by the  economic crisis in which they unintentionally came of age.

It’s not the taking part, it’s the winning that counts

As a country, Britain lurches between overconfidence and arrogance based on a long-dead empire, and a stereotypical sort of self-effacing, prim and proper diffidence. We bumptiously expect a level of international prominence which is no longer truly justified by our economic position, yet we cringe at the ever-intensifying Hollywood showiness of The X Factor.

When it comes to sport, we usually fall into the latter category. England last won the football world cup nearly 50 years ago; there hasn’t been a British men’s winner of Wimbledon for more than 75. So if we obviously can’t win anything, the resigned thinking goes, we should focus  on the taking part. At least we still host the world’s best tennis tournament. Thank goodness the English Premier League is still the best in the world, even if most of the top players are foreign-born. And even though everyone seems to have already accepted that London 2012 won’t be as good as Beijing 2008, at least we’ll have the Olympic legacy to fall back on. Although even that it is doubt: the latest figures from Sport England show that weekly participation among the public, a key aspect of the London 2012 bid, has actually dropped in many sports in the last three years. But never mind, eh? At least we had a go.

Give me a break. Football may be the only sport many Brits care about, except for tennis once a year, and rugby every now and again, but our lack of World Cup success is hardly a comprehensive barometer of our sporting ability. For such a small country, we actually have a breadth of talent in a huge variety of sports. In tennis, Andy Murray is closing in on Roger Federer to take the world number 3 spot, the boys team have just won the Junior Davis Cup, and three out of four semi-finalists in the junior boys at the US Open were British. In athletics, we have Jessica Ennis, Phillips Idowu, and the incomparable Mo Farah. At the Berlin marathon last month, Paula Radcliffe began her comeback after a complicated injury, and was disappointed with third place. We have so many world class cyclists and rowers that we don’t know what to do with them. And as I discovered last week at the GB World Cup, we are thriving at judo: -66kg gold medal winner and U-23 European champion Ashley McKenzie is surely a star in the making, yet the sport suffers from such a lack of coverage that it doesn’t even have a page on the BBC sport website.

Surely a better Olympic legacy would be to celebrate our talent and champions across the board, rather than romanticizing the 1966 World Cup, or fretting about mini tennis participation. Sport is one area where we can afford to be confident.

Stuck for a title for a post about writer’s block: surely there’s a pun in there?

Apparently, about two people continued to check my blog on a regular basis during my dissertation-induced absence. It can’t be my parents as neither of them are internet-savvy enough. So whoever you are; bless your hearts, you are kind.

The truth is, I’ve been suffering from a long-term case of writer’s block. My dissertation has simply used up all my thoughts. Even though I now have loads of free time to read the paper and catch up with the thousands of articles in my google reader (literally, it just says 1000+), my weakened intellectual capacity only has the energy to nod along with the opinion of whoever I’m reading. News stories which would previously have got my ranting juices flowing  now only result in a resigned groan. I no longer take every opportunity to mock the grammatical and syntactical errors of the powerful; I just sigh, and sometimes roll my eyes if I have the energy.

However, one of those thousands of articles has yielded me a handy solution to my problem, in the form of a timely analogy from Seth Godin, via Adam Westbrook;

No one ever gets talker’s block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.

Indeed. So from now on, I’m going to be writing as much as I talk: a lot. Apologies in advance to my two readers.