June 13, 2014

"But if you’re around anyone acting whimsical for long enough, the charm morphs into a grating artificiality."

"I was no exception. I began to detest being around myself. Whimsical’s less popular synonyms began to hold more truth. Capricious. Freakish… Odd. Bizarre. Another possible synonym: phony."

Writes a San Francisco barista named Lucy Schiller who has tired of the emotional labor entailed in playing Amélie for coffee-drinkers.
Alas, whimsicality was the name of the coffee-making game, at least for a young, unsure woman. It disarmed terrifyingly angry or brusque customers. It endeared you to them by summing you up in a palatable way – you were dependably off-kilter and smiley; people looked forward to seeing you. They thought of you as their special barista, and the more charmingly odd you acted, the more you occupied this nook in their brain. You got pretty good tips, and you felt, in an otherwise frighteningly vague time, appreciated and talented. But that took its toll. Eventually my smile hung rather thin. I found myself regarding my attitude like my cell phone bill, hoping that some bubbliness – another word I detested – would rollover into these increasingly embittered months. And I felt like [the] flight attendants [in Arlie Russell Hochschild's "The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling" (1983)], who “spoke of their smiles as being on them but not of them…the smiles are a part of her work, a part that requires her to coordinate self and feeling so that the work seems to be effortless. To show that the enjoyment takes effort is to do the job poorly.”
Via Metafilter, where somebody says:
I adore this article immensely. I came out of college with some ideas about jobs that seem crazy now: I really thought that working as a college radio DJ, a clerk at Cult Cineaste Video Store, a guitar player, or a TA in English Lit were so obviously preferable things one could do that it was perfectly reasonable to close the doors that were opened by my boring Computer Science degree. Why the hell did I believe that? It's almost incomprehensible to me now! And the author of this article nailed it ... the need to feel like you "belong" to the inner circle of the place you live, as judged by your peers, just like you really belonged at your college by your Senior year.

There's also a word unspoken throughout, but it matters: love. What her job required was nurturing the smallest bits of love in the people she served, doling out pinches of the fuel for attraction and affection.... "But it took its toll," she says, rightly. Making everybody love you 5% plays hell with the way you negotiate real love, of friends, of work, and even of the customers whom in another job you'd have normal human inter-relationships with.

23 comments:

SomeoneHasToSayIt said...

Great article.

I would suggest another synonym: "not serious".

That's the one that tales an eventual toll, as in "OK child. Time to grow up now".

MadisonMan said...

In my opinion, a person who is a barrista has to use their apron as a shield and projector. It protects you from anything that the Customer might throw your way, absorbing it before it can harm. And you power it to project a countenance that the customer finds calming and welcoming.

Then, you take off the apron at the end of your shift and you are your own old self again. That way you can leave work behind when you go home.

Bud Norton said...

Winsome grows tiresome.

MadisonMan said...

(I notice the author is smiling very broadly in her picture at the bottom of the article. That made me laugh).

traditionalguy said...

Spot on observation about the current way interactions among service providers and the served are provided and judged.

Being a sing song childlike smiling 6 year old is the only value and the only skill of the computer choke point empowered clerks. That system has enforcers who protect it from any rebellion. Bottomline: the computer is God.



David said...

These are hopeful signs. Youth who have been indoctrinated in bullshit realizing it was bullshit.

It would be better not to surround them with bullshit in the first place, but this is progress.

Plus somehow these two women learned how to write.

Michael K said...

Why would someone smart enough to get a computer science degree show such stupid opinions ? Grade inflation ?

Mid-Life Lawyer said...

Isn't it like this with just about any job? Especially in retail. We put on our job persona and to the extent that it is not the "real" person underneath, we grow to despise the persona and the job and maybe, our real self for being willing to contort ourselves for pay.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

Yes, the twee crap has grown old. Especially since it often masks destructive and downright fascistic beliefs. I avoid like the plague any movie or book described as "quirky".

paul a'barge said...

OK, so she has huge issues with whimsy, but dude, take a look AT HER PHOTO

Srsly? That's some mondo whimsy in a female body.

Ignorance is Bliss said...

Michael K said...

Why would someone smart enough to get a computer science degree show such stupid opinions ?

Intelligence and common sense are not highly correlated.

Mark said...

Girl needs more flair.

Big Mike said...

She's just not up to the requirements of her job. No sense bitching about it.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

One of my favorite scenes in cinema is when Amélie walks the blind man to the metro.

Enjoy.

"A baby's watching a dog that's watching the chickens."

Beautiful.

Absolutely fucking beautiful.

Joan said...

I question her assumptions about her customers' needs, particularly the one about the people staggering out at 4:30AM looking for human interaction: no, they're looking for coffee, with or without breakfast. How many of her customers walked into her cafe thinking, "God, it's that twee girl's shift, can I just wait until it's over so I don't have to deal with her?" Her self-analysis is OK but I question the motivations she's assigning to everyone else. This is an astounding degree of self-regard.

Perhaps it's different in her city, but most people aren't looking for a relationship with their barista. They just want their coffee competently served in a pleasant environment. All that other stuff, the forced relationships? She put that on herself, thinking that's what others wanted. Girl needs to get out of her own head and into the real world more.

HoodlumDoodlum said...

The dark side of Manic Pixie Dreamgirls:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hyIlrfGR5g

Also, has no one mentioned this young lady needs to check her privlege? Has everyone stopped with the #firstworldproblems? I can't keep up.

Guildofcannonballs said...

Too long didn't read.

I saw honesty unfiltered to hip.

A reversion to the time when thoughts expressed included a potential feedback loop hence one up for Buckley.

That's simply too much for me to handle now.

Steve said...

The desire to belong often is dangerous though it seems benign. Read "The Inner Ring", an essay by C. S. Lewis.

Steve said...

The desire to belong often is dangerous though it seems benign. Read "The Inner Ring", an essay by C. S. Lewis.

Zach said...

It figures. Young and directionless in San Francisco, and she figures her problem is she's too nice to people.

Hint: you are not too nice to people. Nobody in San Francisco is too nice to people. Your problem is that you're passive aggressive, and you think being passive aggressive is the same thing as being nice.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Amelie is streaming on Netflix.

stlcdr said...

Doing something difficult garners more tips.

Who'da thunk it?

Tom Billings said...

The complaint of the young lady sounds like what *most* teenage Aspies go through between 8 and 18. When you don't *know* what the social dance of the other person is asking for as a response, you learn rules that get you by. That then conflicts with the continual calls to "be yourself". Doing that usually got you beat up just because you are not doing the locally accepted social dance. At that point, the jock administrators running the school would intone, ..."You've just got to learn how to get along".