During many of my typical workdays, I grab a take-away cappuccino from the nearby coffee house —Robert's it is called. It's a cozy place, usually filled with university students, or at least people who look like university students. How do they afford the insanely expensive coffee there, I do not know.
What I don't know either is why exactly I go to Robert's for the occasional cappuccino, because we do get decent (by my standards at least) coffee in our office, and I don't identify myself as a cool, latte-drinking designah. Maybe it's for the need of a short break from the work-flow, don't know.
The striking difference, however, between Robert's and our office coffee machine, besides the taste of the coffee, is, of course, the fact that the former requires an additional person doing the oh so complicated sequence of preparing a cappuccino. To be honest, even a hopeless nerd like me could prepare such a cappuccino with ten minute's training. Or a bit more sophisticated coffee machine than our's.
So obviously I go there for the service.
Uhh.
The service there doesn't include extra smiles or overt friendliness, though they aren't rude either. (How's that for a service: not rude? Welcome to Finland.) I guess they are university students too who aren't there for the coffee serving, but making enough to afford, well, hanging around in coffee houses, perhaps.
But that's OK to me. We don't want to get too friendly. But the thing is, you see, that I always take the coffee with me, in a take-away cup. People typically take a plastic cover on the cup, so that they don't spill the hot coffee on other people's laps. It's a nice idea, but I still hate those plastic covers. They're pain to put on and they're pain to remove. And it literally sucks to drink the coffee from the little hole in the cover.
Since I have the choice of not taking the dang plastic cover, I always exercise my freedom on this matter and politely refuse to take it. Most people, by default, take the cover, so the clerks offer the cover to me too. Quite reasonable.
But it becomes freakin' irritating after a few dozen times. "No, I don't want the cover, thanks." Over and over again. "Yeah, I don't take the cover, but I can take the candy." (They always give you a piece of candy with the coffee.) "Yes I'm sure about it, I don't want the cover."
Note though that I don't blaim the clerks working at Robert's. I'm sure they go about serving hundreds of different people between my orders and I can't expect them to remember me. Furthermore, there are several, if not dozen, people working at this particular coffee house, most of them perhaps part-time. So they don't remember me. That's not a big deal.
The point is, however, that I still expect them to behave like normal human beings. Normal human beings get a clue after few hints. If I never take the plastic cover, it might be that I won't take it this time, either. (If do take it, I won't be insulted if I am not automatically offered one.) So it irritates me when I always have to explicitly remind that, no, I don't want to take the damn plastic cover. But I keep it to myself, because, like I said, it's not exactly their fault. (If anyone working at the said coffee house should ever read this, please don't be insulted.)
So: I expect them to remember me, but I shouldn't.
Back to my workstation, with the cappuccino, thank you very much.
Here the world is upside down. I normally don't expect that the software that I use to remember my idioms. But the sad thing is that they so could do it. It would be no sweat for the computer to remember the plastic cover preference for all the people in the world. Yet they usually don't remember a single thing about my work habits.
What a waste.