Happy & Healthy
PURE COFFEE
by Maddy Stolk
It is my favourite flex-work spot, with the best coffee you could wish for. It is also the favourite workplace of half my neighbourhood: the Coffee Company on my corner. Who still needs an office when there is a power socket as well as a USB connection under every chair? I kid you not. How they stay in business is beyond me, because the place is full of deadbeats who happily last six hours on one latte macchiato. To compensate, I start drinking ridiculous amounts, which results in me staring at the ceiling in the evening, stricken with caffeine.
So on some days, my neighbours are my colleagues - with all the irritations that entails. The kindly old gentleman with the semi-articulate, white-wavy hair who always greets so kindly, turns out to be practically deaf and talking very loudly. And laughing. And coughing. He's not retired yet, as he talks on the phone all day long at volume ten with his accountant, his web designer (to whom he is always very angry, and the rest of the visitors by now too: do your job, you asshole, then we'll get rid of the complaining) and his son who always promises to drop by, but never does. I silently flirt with the rather handsome gentleman who is also there at least four times a week - it works just a tad less well when he's not. Then there is the caricature hipster, with complicated knuckle tattoos, bun and shaved neck, who always pretends to be working, but is actually watching episodes of James Corden's Carpool Karaoke. I know because I was sitting next to him recently, and I couldn't take my eyes off Mariah Carey's improbably bulging bosom. All I Want for Christmas is one such breast.
The place is, in short, just like a real office. If a few unsuspecting visitors come in who just want a cup of coffee (the idé), they usually drop out very quickly because of the icy silence that descends while they are just sitting down to enjoy it. It's an unspoken code: how do we work these chatterboxes out the door as quickly as possible? Silence, a touch of side-eye and otherwise stare tightly at your screen - works every time.
“I kid you not.”
Recently there had been a break-in: the thieves had smashed the entire glass front for convenience. There was temporarily no door left, and no window, and in fact no front at all. So the shop was closed. When I came walking in, there were already a few familiar faces lingering in front of the door and everyone seemed equally dishevelled. Actually, we sort of had ice-free, but I had a deadline so I sat down at a café down the road, as I had run out of coffee at home and was now outside anyway.
From the moment I flipped open my laptop, the other guests looked at me with closely veiled annoyance. It seemed like an unspoken code. When I went in search of an electrical outlet just under an hour later, the waitress said: ‘We don't have those here. On purpose.’ Sometimes you just have to cut your losses, so a moment later I was back outside.
And lo and behold: there was a life-size piece of bright blue agricultural plastic hanging in front of the window, the lights were on and when I crawled under the plastic I could already hear the milk frother hissing again. The carpoool-hipster had a knitted beanie over his bun and everyone else was just still wearing their coats, but hey: I was home again.
