By FAR my most popular post on Tumblr

[breathedout]

Sometimes I think back on the time I spent working as a barista, and it seems SO STRANGE to me that “coffee shop AU” has become synonymous with narratives that are low on conflict, high on wholesome romance. During the year I spent working at a coffee shop:

• A coworker of mine took a bunch of psychedelics, walked through some strangers’ plate-glass door, and threatened them with a bowie knife, leading to his arrest and imprisonment (and, needless to say, a late opening for the coffee shop that morning). 
• Another coworker, an ex-military type with a young wife and a new baby, decided to smoke up for the first time ever with two other mutual coworkers, in the back of one of their trucks; and ended up having a three-way with them which ended his marriage. 
• I had a nervous breakdown, stopped being able to eat food or hold conversations, and ended up sleeping on my coworker’s couch for three weeks before she finally called my parents to come collect me.
• Multiple store managers were fired for embezzlement. (Reminder: this was within the space of a single year.)
• Yet another coworker, who was seventeen at the time, started dog-sitting for a couple of regulars in their (I’m guessing) early 50s, and ended up in an ongoing creepy and incidentally illegal ~relationship~ with them both. 
• Various employees discovered, in the course of cleaning the bathrooms: couples fucking in the bathrooms; junkies passed out in the bathrooms; drunks puking in the bathrooms; both adults and children weeping in the bathrooms; a woman bleeding all over the bathroom from a gash in her throat (??); a dude standing in the middle of the bathroom floor and pissing in the opposite direction from the toilet, so that when the employee opened the unlocked door she got piss all over her (????). 
• The owner of the bridal shop across the street was exposed as both abusive toward her employees and also cooking the books, which led to my coffee shop taking on a couple of untrained and weirdly conservative bridal shop workers for a few months while the bridal shop was shuttered and sold to new owners. Later the larcenous former bridal shop owner came down with some horrible disease which caused her to lose both her hands.  
• There was a regular universally referred to as “Sketchy Steve,” who came in at 7am for a three-shot latte with room for Seagrams 7, and dealt drugs to all us baristas. I actually, at one point (I cannot believe I was this stupid), went inside Sketchy Steve’s house, and allowed him to spend like half an hour showing me his collection of découpaged outlet plates and also soliciting me for sex while I uncomfortably yet studiously declined.
• Right before I started, the store manager had walked off the job in the middle of a shift, and ¾ of the employees had walked out after him. None of them ever returned. 

Like, working on the front lines of food service was the most operatically sordid professional experience I have ever had, and one of the most surreal; and it is hilarious to me that THAT, of all jobs, is the one that has come to stand for soft-focus domestic romance in fandom circles. 

(This post had 93,600 notes on Tumblr.)

Comments

[oulfis]

Works inspired by this one: Half & Half & Half by oulfis.

[pensnest]

*boggles* I haven't written a coffee shop AU, but I must admit, I would never have thought life as a barista would be quite so, uh, exciting.

It's kinda tempting now....

[whitefeatheredtrico]

I remember this post! Definitely interesting prompts for a story.

[clarasteam]

I remember this one! *boggles all over again*

[oulfis]

I love your choice of icon!

[clarasteam]

by sinkandrise, who also made this one :)

[breathedout]

Ha, wonderful. :-)

[greywash]

this is still so amazing, and also consistent with my experience in retail.

[anelith]

Your Tumblr post made such an impression on me that it changed my view of coffee shops forever. :-)

[little_brisk]

STILL THE REALEST

[virtual_particle]

This post continues to amaze me every time it comes up.

*saves to DW memories*

[chestnut_pod]

SOMEhow I have never seen this and. Oh my god. I am sorry? I will never comfortably enter a coffeeshop again.

[albaparthenicevelut]

Yeeeah this is my experience with food service, drugs, drama, and many overworked, underpaid people making questionable choices. :P

[fffinnagain]

Haha hah! I have seen more references to bathroom horrors and coworker disasters in recent coffeeshop AU fics. Maybe the message is getting out there.

[breathedout]

My unlooked-for fandom legacy, LOL.

[teaforlupin]

I am pretty sure I remember this from tumblr, and it is giving me the hysterical giggles

[the7endless]

Are you sure your coffee shop wasn't in Night vale? :D

This is surreal and hilarious and makes me want to give my local coffee shop staff cookies and chocolate.

[breathedout]

LOL well, it was in an extremely affluent neighborhood sharing real estate with a drug-saturated top-tier private liberal arts college, so: close enough.