You are my customer

This week, I've worked five eight-hour shifts in a row. Only one of them has started after 6am and ended before 10pm. I can make 9,000 different variations on coffee, with or without milk, sugar, milk substitutes, sugar substitutes, steaming, foaming, icing, blending, pressing, straining- in addition to several tea and juice drinks. Every ten minutes, every surface that touches either food, drink, or my hands, is wiped down with dilute bleach, shined, and neatened. We also sell something like thirty different whole-bean coffees. I can tell you the origin, processing, and characteristics of each bean.

I can lead you through coffee like its wine. I can tell you why you don't like what you don't like, and why you like what you do. I'm always happy to see you, and remember your name, your order, your husband's order. Your whole office's order. I can take your order in several languages, I can make a drink your picky five-year-old won't know isn't fruit punch. I'll agree with your problems and flirt with your one-eyed grandpa.

I can do all of this, and you'll still think I'm mindless. You'll be surprised to hear that I'm a college student. When I get your joke about madeleine cookies and marcel proust, you'll be shocked. You'll be more shocked to hear that this isn't all I can do. I've worked in offices. I've worked in marketing, and I've done the admin thing. I don't LIKE it. I've worked in theater. And I don't LIKE it. I'm tired. I don't want to do a job sitting down, doing not much. I don't want to cater to egos. I don't want to defer to someone on everything, or spend my time falsifying time cards and fucking around on the internet.

There is a great divide in this country, though. The division is between people who can wear their own clothes to work, and people who can't. I can't. I have a dress code to follow. When I have my work clothes on, I am no longer myself- college student, sarcastic, funny, bright, emotional, cynical, a dilletante of the third type, liable to be rude, angry, forgetful, superficial, mopey, and shy. I am none of those things- I am polite and considerate. I am your barista. You can tell, because, for your comfort, I dress differently from you. I belong to the milk steaming caste, suburban order.

I wear colors designated for me by others, under an apron that I don't own. I wear shirts I would otherwise not own, light makeup that slips down my face in the steam, and small, tasteful earrings. This is all to delineate my separation from you. Because I do not type for a living, and theoretically don't think for a living, I am marked by my knit, collared shirt. I wander through stores and gawk at the clothes it would suddenly be impractical for me to purchase. How can a person possibly own JEANS? Low-cut tank tops? Flippy skirts and open-toed shoes? I lust after wrap dresses, uneven hemlines, jewel tones, polka-dots, sweetheart necklines, kitten heels, jeans and tees and sneakers. Cords. Clothes from the salvation army and savers. I want to wear my red-brocade smoking jacket. I want to slip it on over a threadbare teeshirt and well-fitting jeans. And I don't want to have to look forward to dressing myself as myself all week.

I bought some clothes yesterday. I spent a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars is a LOT of money for me. A lot. I don't make a thousand dollars a month. I didn't buy one item I could wear to work. I bought a knit dress, mid-calf length, with an old-couch wedgewoody blue print. I bought a floaty hippy dress that would look lovely with a denim jacket or my vintage tweed blazer. I bought a nice cap-sleeve dress, brown, with a teensy print, and a beige low-cut top. I also bought a sexy strapless bra. I am wracked with guilt over these purchase, not only did I spend too much money; I feel like I can't live up to them. I can't anticipate more than two days off a week.

People come into my cafe in anything. Men in suits, women in sundresses and gym clothes, heels, sneakers...anything. High school girls in short skirts and uniforms, college students in uniformly shrunken and ironic tee0shirts.. They come in the middle of the day, late at night- any time. I marvel at these people. I wonder what it would be like to run my own day, to wear my own clothes, to talk like myself for just a moment.