Now Entering the Dark Times...

Term-end madness has officially arrived, and as such my posts will be short and likely incoherent from now until the end of April. But before I completely lose the ability to think in sentences that do not include quotes from textbooks and lecture notes, I feel like it's time for another edition of Tales from the Coffee House.

Ch. 3

Some people are actually in disagreement with me on this story, or at least, with the umbrage I took to the incident. I acknowledge that I sometimes take things too personally, especially at work - it's hard to work in a tiny, independent coffee shop for 5 years and not lose objectivity, though.

So anyways, I was at work last week and in comes this guy, who seats himself at a computer. Not an unusual event, to be sure, although it is annoying - often in the past, people have done this while I've been busy and then tried to claim that they were using the machine for as much as an hour less than what I end up charging them for. We've actually banned people for being persistently and blatantly stupid in this way. Stealing network time, however, was not this guy's crime.

(I'm going to interject here and point out that these stories are about my work. In a coffee shop. Which sells coffee.)

The guy had actually come in to my shop to use a computer, carrying a Tim Horton's coffee and donut. Now, some people have pointed out to me that if he was only there to use the computer, it might not have occurred to him that bringing in coffee from a corporate competitor was kind of a no-no; he was, after all, just looking to check his email. Still, I was a little upset. So I let him know, in the politest way possible, that we frowned on bringing foodstuffs from other restaurants in to ours; it's not very good for business. I mean, if you walked in to a small, family-owned pizza place and saw someone eating Domino's Delivery, it probably wouldn't engender a great deal of consumer confidence, would it? And, to the guy's credit, he made minimal fuss about putting it back in his car.

But still, come on. Either support my business (which is really not mine, but that's neither here nor there) or don't, but don't be an ignorant ass about it.