The adventures of the Super Baristas

or, Kimi and Joan's Not So Coffee Christmas Debacle

this piece reads a little bit like David Sedaris's Santaland Diaries, but that's probably because I listen to that piece on my iPod at least once a month.

but here it is. in all its glory. i've been working on this piece since it happened a few years ago. all of the events actually occured, but some of them have been a bit embellished. it's not perfect.

enjoy.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Christmas. The family and the gifting and the cooking are fun, but I’ve never been a Christmas Enthusiast. You know the ones I’m talking about. The people who have knit sweater vests adorned with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus and mistletoe. The people who put up their Christmas trees in late November because they are so excited that they simply must prove it to someone. Who that someone is, I’m not exactly sure and I’d bet two candy canes they don’t know either. Well, it wasn’t until I was seventeen years old that Christmas became my enemy.



My best friend Kim and I worked in a coffee shop called Java*. We could tell from day one by the name alone that this shop was doomed for mediocrity, but it paid our way to the movies pretty regularly, so we weren’t complaining. Come December, our boss decides that it’s time for a very long family vacation just in time for the shop to take a nightly residence in the local botanical gardens. So Kim and I agree to run the shop as well as the coffee stand at the gardens on top of being full-time students. We didn’t agree to do it because we wanted to. We did it because we didn’t have a choice. We couldn’t tell our bosses that we were quitting right when they decided to go on vacation. Or, well, we could have but then we would have lost our really cool jobs. Kim would have been out of a job and I would have had to go back to being a cashier at Bi-Lo. Ew.



What we didn’t know when we signed up for the Christmas job was that we would be doing everything. We made schedules, ran errands, went to the bank, placed orders, etc. etc. I think back on it and now and I know our bosses must have been doing drugs to let a seventeen-year-old me and an eighteen-year-old Kim run the entire coffee shop. And of course we were breaking all kinds of laws. We were both pulling sixty hour weeks and we were still in high school. I really can’t stress that enough. So everyday after school I would go home, walk my dog, swing by Kim’s place to pick her up (we almost always refused to work without the other), and we would head to the shop to relieve the morning help (our boss’s sister who was completely incompetent and really rude to our favourite regulars) and take care of the day’s to-do list. Then, Thursday through Sunday, we would schedule someone else to work at the shop at night and we would go to the gardens. Except on Sundays when we would both open the shop and then head to the gardens. Twelve-hour shifts were the best. I’m really surprised our parents didn’t call OSHA on the owners of the shop.



But I digress.



The purpose of the coffee stand was for us to sell coffee, hot cider, cocoa and cookies to all of the Christmas Enthusiasts bringing their loved ones to go on carriage rides through the gardens or watch gospel choirs sing gloriously dramatic versions of Christmas carols. Kim and I assumed that there wouldn’t be too many people hankering for a cup of coffee or cocoa, so we came with enough supplies for (what we thought would be) the week and about $100 in change in our little cashbox. I laugh when I think about how stupid that was. Not only did we barely have enough supplies for the first night, but we made a total killing. After counting the box down to $100, we made a $400 profit, which was more than Java made on a busy day.



Kim and I suddenly realized why our boss skipped town for this wonderful little endeavor.



The hundreds of people who swarmed our stand weren’t patient. They were toe-tapping, watch-checking jerks who clearly didn’t care that there were only two young girls behind the counter working as fast as they could. They wanted cocoa and they wanted it NOW. We had people who would walk up to the stand, quickly realize that we couldn’t make them a latte due to lack of espresso machine and in their forlorn state order a cup of cocoa. Then they would get their cocoa and realize that it wasn’t made with milk and roll their eyes and pay for their drink. WHAT DID THEY EXPECT!? They came to the gardens to enjoy Christmas festivities and, the way Kim and I saw it, they were LUCKY to have us there to provide them with hot, delicious beverages. And then there were the people who couldn’t decide what they wanted. We had regular coffee, decaf coffee, hot cocoa, and hot apple cider. What, pray tell, is so difficult about that? Kim and I were perpetually pleasant with everybody, but we really just wanted to start screaming at most people because there was a line that seemed miles long and some people couldn’t decide what they wanted. The memory makes my eye twitch.



After about three nights into (what was about to become) the fiery pit of Christmas hell, Kim and I figured out a system. I took money and distributed drinks and did the customer service thing while she kept us stocked. She heated cider, ran back and forth from the kitchen to the stand to make coffee and mostly made cocoa. One night (I've purposely forgotten which) we were at our usual stations when something really didn't feel right. I heard a splattering sound and felt my feet getting wet but disregarded it because I had a line from me to the Christmas tree-shaped tower of Orchids. Oh by the way, if you've never smelled Orchids in large groups, please, I beg you, do not go out of your way to do so. They smell like horses. At any rate. The splattering sound got a little out of control and Kim was in the zone, so she didn't notice it. I looked down to see that the spout on the percolator we were using to warm the cider was in the "pour" position. We were spilling gallons of sticky apple cider on to the carpeted floor of the botanical gardens.

This is when the Christmas coffee stand adventure went from slightly inconvenient to catastrophic. Our night spiraled out of control.

After the apple cider fiasco, we couldn't let it sit and soak into the carpet and so we both had to stop what were doing in order to clean up the mess. And that made the line a lot longer. And that made the garden staff angry. And when they came over to speak to us they saw the tip jar, which was apparently against the rules. They gave us a talking to about speedy service (which only slowed us down because we had to focus on them and not the increasingly belligerent customers or lake of cider on the floor) and asked us to get rid of the tip jar. It didn't move an inch. I will never understand what inspired them to give us that talk while we were in the middle of a fiasco. We knew that the line was long. We knew that we weren’t moving very fast. BUT WHEN YOU ONLY HAVE TWO CARAFES AND THREE PERCOLATORS, YOU DO THE BEST YOU CAN. So approaching us while we were cleaning the floor was a really bad idea and made us really angry. We got agitated and increasingly short with the garden staff. The staff member who came to speak to us just kept repeating himself about speed and customer service and the tip jar and blah blah blah. Just repeating the same things over and over and over. At one point Kim finally said, “Sir. We understand. We are doing our best and will get your patrons through this line as soon as we are done cleaning the floor. Thank you.” But what she meant was, “Excuse me, sir? Yes. If you don’t go the fuck away in the next three seconds, I will be forced to pour the rest of the decaf on your crotch and that will slow us down even more. So why don’t you leave us alone?” He opened his mouth to continue his lecture and I snapped my head up from the mess and said, “Thank you. Sir.” He shook his head and walked away.

Once the staff member left, we caught up with ourselves and the rest of the line, and took a second to knock back the rest of our $1 jumbo iced teas from McDonalds. Then, of course, another rush came through. And this rush was epic. Full of testy parents who were sick of their own elderly parents, wielding screaming children who were throwing fantastic fits. To top it off (we thought) Kim and I were constantly spilling hot water on our hands. I know Kim still has a burn on the back of her arm from this particular rush. We did our best to notify parents that the hot cocoa was very hot and that their children should wait to drink it. We forgot to tell one parent. Just one. And the next thing we knew, there is another screaming child standing at the coffee stand. Kim and I hung our heads and very shamefully apologized to the cooperative parent who said that they should have thought of it and we need not worry. I still think about him and what might have happened if he’d been angry. What if it had been one of those ridiculous court cases like when the woman sued McDonald’s for their hot coffee? What if, indeed.

During this rush, we didn't notice that the giant vat of hot cocoa we thought was prepared was actually quite the opposite. Kim sat down and started working on it and I took care of everyone who didn't want cocoa and told everybody else to hold their horses.

So there we were. Sitting on the sticky floor over a hundred cocoa packets filling a bucket with said cocoa, hands covered in Christmas cheer, clothing laden with stains from the sugary drinks, hair matted against our necks in fallen ponytails, and we laughed. We looked at each other and laughed so hard that we made other people laugh. The joy that we were emitting was putting people in the Christmas spirit. You could tell by the way they looked at us with adoration and nostalgia, remembering what it was like to be our age. But what they didn't know was that it was in that moment, that brief moment of childish laughter and fun, we had been pushed over the edge. We weren't having fun! Fun was the last thing on our minds. We had gone crazy. Christmas and Christmas's Enthusiasts had become the bane of our collective existence.

We probably pumped out close to 300 cups of cocoa that night. At the end of it, we took down our hair and washed out the coffee pots. On our way out the door we nodded to the tired Santa Claus who was collecting his belongings and walked out to my car. It took us a minute to find the strength to sit down. It was probably twenty degrees outside, but it felt like a breezy summer night in comparison to the hell we had just endured.

I will never feel the same way about Christmas again. The experience at the gardens was far more eye-opening than any last-minute Christmas shopping experience I have ever had. I would rather fight for the last Hello Kitty toaster at Target all day than go through the gardens again. When you’re on the other side of the counter, the customer-service side, you get to see people for who they really are. And during Christmas, when people are with their extended families, they get crazy. What little patience people had left is gone. I don’t care to see people for who they really are anymore. I enjoy my false sense of people. I take solace in it. This year I have been celebrating Christmas since mid-October because I performed in a world premier musical version of Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life.” I have come to terms with Christmas a little bit better because of the magic of the film. But still, whenever I see a Christmas Enthusiast, I cower a little bit inside.