When your local coffee shop becomes your office.
Not like anyone working here ever gave me permission to set up shop, it’s more like they’re just prepared to overlook the fact that I tend to occupy that same seat in front of the window most afternoons, pecking away at my keyboard, giving off the impression that I’m doing something really important. For the record, I’m mostly not. It’s all a smokescreen.
I’m just here for the window.
There was a time when that was sort of true. Being a student of people and humanity, sitting in a window along the town’s main drag can bring a lot of those people and a lot of that humanity right to you and right by you as they pass along the sidewalk, busily on their way to wherever it is that they’re busily on their way to.
But, honestly, it’s become much more than that now.
I don’t know if I was afraid of being exposed as a fraud or something, but I’ve noticed that I’ve become extremely productive while sitting at that window seat, surprisingly so, because all that work is somehow interspersed with conversations with other patrons and a genial back-and-forth between myself and the baristas working the joint. At home I have trouble concentrating if even just the radio is on, but here, in the hurly-burly of a Renfrew downtown, I manage to talk, wave, converse, wave some more., then wave some more again, all the while pounding out about 2000 words of content in about 90 minutes of time.
I first got on to this place when a buddy of mine asked me to meet him for coffee, and selected this coffee shop, the Ottawa Valley Coffee place, as where we would meet. This friend, renowned everywhere because of his signature fedora, would park himself at the very table I’m sitting at right now, and it was a steady parade of people walking by, noticing, and waving. If being noticed in public is part of any aspect of my game, then I had just discovered the appropriate location. Or maybe I just had to spend more time with the fedora guy, because in my experience, that works too. Or just get my own fedora.
One thing that’s struck me is how similar baristas are to bartenders, what with all the people they talk to over the course of a day. The random in-and-outers, the regular in-and-outers, and then the guys like me who set up shop, sort of like Norm and the boys from the show Cheers. Apparently regulars get to choose their own cups, but I don’t consider myself enough of a regular to think that I’m eligible to have my likeness carved into the Mount Rushmore of OVC customers. So we’re not at the preferred cup stage just yet.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that baristas are really smart, or at least these ones are. Corrine is reading Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, while Leah configured my bank card to my phone and then to my watch. Ashley knows more things about more things than I ever will, and she’s just in her mid-thirties, which kind of makes me jealous. Any stuff Ashley doesn’t know, the other Ashley knows, because she’s smart too but also a mom, and that makes her smarter than the rest of us. And Porsha, the weekend barista, takes Calculus, Chemistry, and Biology in school, so she’s so smart that nobody even understands her, but we all just nod and smile so that she feels like she fits in. Josh is around periodically, but he’s always busy doing something so I don’t have a real sense of what he’s all about, other than he appears to hate cats judging from what I’ve overheard, but I have no context to really flesh that out much.
Gary’s smart too. He’s a legitimate regular, or so I assume, given that he’s here every single day I am. So if we’re carving people into the face of Rushmore, Gary’s gonna be one of the first. I talked to him for at least an hour the other day, got absolutely nothing done, but actually accomplished much more through that conversation than I would have had I been on my laptop.
A really nice French couple were just in, and they helped me send a file to the servers using my phone’s air drop feature, which is pretty cool, since had it not been for them, all that sharing business would have gone for nothing. It’s not like there’s a ton of sharing going on in the first place, but when there is, thank heavens for French couples, without whom none of this would be possible. At least until Leah comes back to work. Or customer John comes in for his afternoon coffee, bringing with him his media savvy.
The people here may well be mortified to know I’m writing about them when they probably assumed I was writing about local government or whatever else an old has-been like myself might be involved with as he plays out his golden years in the front window of a local coffee shop on the main drag of The Big Smoke. They’d be mortified in that they’re not the type to bring attention to themselves. Rather, they’re the type who do a really sold job of giving their attention to you, either in service delivery or by just being solid people with their time, their smiles, and the atmosphere of welcome and acceptance that seems to be embraced by the place and the people within it.
I’ll keep showing up here for as long as they’ll have me.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 