Off The Clock

Really had to pee walking into the coffee shop and that’s not the type of thing you're going to reveal to the barista at the counter. I had to pee and I did not say I had to pee. I just stood there and I said the things you say, how is your day, cold enough for you, and I did not say the thing that was true which was I had to pee. A window is a thing you make when you are not saying the thing that is true. I was making a window. I was making a window the whole time I was not saying I had to pee.

Somewhere in there my head started running numbers I never asked it to run. I counted the number of people behind the counter. Weighed that against how long the line looked. Figured in the time it'd take to wash my hands, which you can skip if you're moving fast enough and nobody's checking. All of it pointed to a margin of time. Not just go pee and come back, an actual timed return, synced so the drink would be sit- ting there the second I walked back up to the counter. A universal law of coffee shops that I had just invented.

I pushed the bathroom door open and heard it right then. Milk steamer cutting off, then "cortado" landing right on top of it. I hadn't even made it back to the counter yet and it was already sitting there waiting on me.

Nailed it.

After I picked it up I took a sip walking toward the door and that's when it hit me. There had been a urinal right next to the sit down toilet I just stood over. Damn. Could've saved myself a few seconds and I hadn't even clocked it in the moment, too busy running the schedule to notice the easier option sitting a foot away from me the whole time.

A decade pouring drinks will rewire you like that. You learn to catch someone's order before they lift a hand, you know a table's ready for the check before they've thought to ask for it, and after a couple years you stop noticing you're doing any of it. So there's something almost funny about standing in a line running inventory on a coffee shop's staff on my day off.

For a long time I figured it was just what being good at the job looked like. Efficient. The kind of thing that gets you noticed without anyone ever saying it, because it means less work for whoever's managing you. Nobody made me wear a name tag that morning. I just forgot I had one on.

Last month I sat at a restaurant just down the street from mine, a place I don't work, on a night I wasn't scheduled anywhere. Ordered unsweetened tea, because apparently I enjoy suffering even in my beverages. I didn’t drink it. Watched the guy behind the stick instead. He was in the weeds, four tickets deep, and I clocked it long before he even said a word, the same way I'd want a customer to clock being under- water when I'm the one drowning. I tipped like I already knew his whole night, be- cause I did, because I've had that exact night more times than I'd want to add up. I wasn't a customer in there. I was a coworker who happened to be sitting on the wrong side of the bar, and some part of me never crossed over.

The part I didn't want to land on, standing there with a cortado in hand: I wasn't taking care of the barista's day. I was taking care of mine. Somebody else making the drink, somebody else deciding when it's ready, nothing required of me at all, that's not something I know how to enjoy. I have to invent a job to do somewhere in there, even if the job is timing my own bladder to a milk steamer. Being taken care of makes me more uneasy than taking care of people ever has.

People talk about multitasking like it's something to be proud of, a service industry badge, six things going at once and praying none of them crash into each other, and you wear the exhaustion like it proves something about you. Nobody was paying me for any of that in the coffee shop, though. I ran the math anyway, for free, and that's the part that actually gets under my skin. Not that I'm decent at reading a room. That I can't find a version of myself that isn't doing it, even in a room where the whole point was supposed to be that I didn't have to.

I couldn't tell you the exact day service stopped being a job and turned into something closer to a personality. It just gets easier over time to run the numbers than to actually sit still, until one morning sitting still is a thing you used to know how to do and don't anymore.

I just went in for a coffee and somehow still clocked in.