A cappuccino? Would you like a large one?

“I return from barista training with the absolute conviction that I do not want to spend my life making coffee.  Unfortunately, making a good soy latte macchiato with half a shot may be the only concrete skill I have, so it looks like I might be doomed to dealing with these problems for a few years yet:

1/ A lot of coffee shop customers (particularly in Notting Hill, which is where I work), seem to consider the people who provide them with their daily coffee to be a subspecies.  Obviously, if I work in a coffee place, I must have made a few wrong turns in my life, right? So obviously, it follows that they have the right to treat me as a servant.  Please, smile at your barista, and thank them when they hand you your change.  Reciprocate when they ask you how you are.  They’ll probably appreciate it so much they’ll give you an extra stamp on your loyalty card.

2/ People genuinely complain if they don’t have a leaf shape in the foam of their latte.

3/ “A cappuccino?   To drink in or take away?  Would you like a large one?  Anything to eat with that?  Maybe a croissant or a mini mince pie?  Do you have a loyalty card?  Would you like to take one?”.  Try repeating that 200 times a day.

4/ The people who take 40 minutes to order are always the ones who complain at having to queue.  In the words of the great Dr Perry Cox, “if someone is standing in front of me in line at the coffee shop and can’t decide what they want in the half hour it took to get to the register then I should be allowed to kill them”.  Again, imagine getting that feeling 200 times a day.”

Or thus I was planning to begin this entry, before I spent an hour slogging halfway across a malfunctioning London transport system to said barista training only to discover that I was the only person who hadn’t been told it was cancelled.   But I’m not one to let such structural concerns stop me banging on about something, or making the tenuous link to the recent tuition fees debate (again!).

I do not, in fact, work in a coffee place because of all the wrong turns I have made in my life, but because I’m a student and it is no longer possible to study without also working part time.  However, and I never thought I would say this, I am lucky to have only had to pay top-up fees.   My sister, who also works in a coffee place, may not be so lucky.  Will she spend her university days serving coffee to people who took full advantage of their free university education to get comfortable jobs and not pay tax?  People who have decided it’s her job to get us out of the economic mess they initiated when she was only 14?  And if she decides she can’t afford £27,000 to study musical theatre, we will have lost an extremely talented singer and actress, and gained another coffee place employee.  Worth it?