Customer ordered an everything bagel with cream cheese and a large chai. Customers ordered three bagels with cream cheese (wound up, after “the chaos”, being an everything and two plain) and a wheat bagel with veggie cream cheese.
“The Chaos”: at the peak of the three hour rush, workmen downstairs were disassembling refrigerator, to try and get it out the door. Not only did this cause a deep loud growling through much of the noon hour, but it filled the entire passage way to the kitchen, so you were squeezing through a long miniscule fissure to get a fresh milk gallon.
Attendant’s apprehension of the cross purposes of himself… how he’d really not like to be doing this. His apprehension of this brought to a pitch as customer after customer comes through the door and there isn’t occasion to clean up the mess…. Attendant cleaning up, thinks: why have I been cleaning so long and this place doesn’t look at all clean? It’s actually amazing that the counter he just thought he’d cleared and the floor he’d imagined he’d swept looks as it does. (He isn’t “good” at this, he reflects.)
Recycling: had the attendant’s hopelessness and cynicism reached such a pitch that he now viewed it with utter hostility? He’d seen what people put in the recycling, he had seen the public sanitation worker empty the regular trash and the recycling into the same bin week after week, did any of this really matter?
Attendant reached with longhead dry mop to grab straw wrapper and its torn off end from under table. Shepherding the trash between the table and chair leg. Just. a.bout.Got it, straw wrapper is com…ing… COMING…!
Customer ordered medium skim latte and everything bagel, untoasted.
Was it the grind, the roast… attendant had had to work very hard the past couple days to get any sort of basically serviceable espresso shot from the machine: filling the portafilter as tightly as may be, to the absolute limit, then bracing the machine while he jammed it in, straining arm and bruising fingers over a three hour rush. Dreading arrival of anyone ordering espresso drink.
Attendant had change in his right front pocket and keys in his left front pocket whose jangling (even after he had moved them to his back right and left pockets) did not create his negative mood, but exacerbated it, taking it to the next level — and yet actually seemed so irritating as to be the sole cause. If only he could empty his pockets, he would think, then everything would be alright.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 