Crema

This post is a bunch of whining about nothing important. If you have better things to do, I suggest you go do them.

Well, I survived my "visit" yesterday at work. OK, let me give you a little background:

I have a feeling that Barnes & Noble has more employment tiers than most companies. I mean, in my store, there are harmless drudges like me (Booksellers, with a capital B, we're called), leads, managers, assistant managers, and the store manager. above the store manager is the district manager. Now, even though all managers are forcibly trained in the cafe, most of them don't know crap about it, so to assist the district manager is the district cafe manager, who is the one who actually knows how to make drinks, serve food, etc. I don't know how large a "district" is supposed to be, or if it's measure by miles or stores, but our district is about half the state, with a few stores from neighboring states. At any rate, you must understand, it is the job of the district manager and the district cafe manager to 1. nitpick and 2. intimidate us. Really, it's true. When they come to the store for a visit, they HAVE to find something wrong. I guess it's assumed that the people in the store can run the store correctly, so when they come, it's their only job to find minor adjustments and talk about them as if they were the end of the world.

So, this is what happened yesterday. The district manager and district cafe manager arrived around 9AM and were still going strong when I left at 4:30. The first thing they did was talk about the physical appearance of the cafe. Every time the cafe guy comes, he rearranges the counter. Let me say that our counter is probably 10-12 feet long. On it, as the permanent fixtures, the register and the espresso machines. We don't have a lot of counter space because our registers are these huge hulking computers that run on Windows '95. I mean, the program we use for the register is a DOS program. And the two espresso machines take up about 2 1/2 or 3 feet of room. Then, we must fit a place big enough to hold three coffee pots right beside the register, and a place at the very end big enough to hold all the drinks and food for customers. Beside the espresso machines, we have a place with a dipper well and two pumps, one for chocolate and one for chai. Sounding pretty crowded? Well, add to that a gift card spinner, a basket filled with cookies, a display of 12 bags of coffee, a rack for mints, a rack for candy bars, a little rack filled with CDs, a rack as wide as the register, filled with tins of tea, and two big jars for biscotti, and you get the picture.

Yes, we have to keep all that crap on the counter, and of course it looks bad and cluttered. Every time the cafe guy comes, he rearranges it. The funny thing is, every time he comes, he assumes that WE'RE the ones who put it that way, and wants to change it around, when, no, he was the one who put it that way about 6 months before. After spending about two hours doing that, while wasting the time of 3 of my store managers, then they go to lunch, not inviting my cafe manager. BWAH! The entire visit has nothing to do with anything but the cafe!! After they return, they start in on the displays in and around the cafe. By the time they're done with that, it's about 3:30. What have the cafe servers been doing all this time? Oh, business as usual, with a few extra things so that we don't get busted for doing something bad. Then the cry goes up, "Who is supposed to be the barista today? Let's see how you guys make drinks." I, of course, am the barista, and there I go, in front of 6 people, to make drinks.

Firstly, let me state that although it is the job of these people to intimidate, I was not the least stressed out all day. I don't know why. I complied to a T with their every bullshit whim not out of intimidation, but for my cafe manager, who looked like he was going to have a nervous breakdown, throttle the cafe guy, or both. "Let's just go basic," he said, "make me a latte and a cappuccino." I assumed that he wanted me to make them separately, so that's what I did, cappuccino first, latte second. We passed them around everyone so they could feel the difference between the latte and the cappuccino (cappuccinos are lighter.) And then he proceeded to give me a few "tips," such as *gasp* making two drinks a the same time and pulling cappuccino foam out with a spatula. I mean, I acted as if I were receiving the 10 commandments on the mountaintop, but looking back on it, he didn't tell me anything that I don't already know. I make two and three drinks from the same pitcher all the time and I always use the spatula if I'm making anything else with a cappuccino, or if I'm making a dry cappuccino.

And then he drilled my friend Jen on frappuccinos, which you could tell he knew infinitely less about (by the way, did I mention that during my trial, he said, "I've been making drinks for 20 years," "I've been making drinks for a really long time. I mean a REALLY long time" and "I've been making drinks so long, I won't even TELL you how long." He also thanked me 4 times for making the drinks, not out of profuseness, but because he forgot he'd already said it). His only criticism of her? (By the way, I went along with his "tips" so much because there IS an art to making espresso drinks. I like being a barista and when I make a good drink, I take pride in that. But let's just say that the process of making blended coffee drinks has become so streamlined and idiot-proofed that if the fine art of barista-ing is like writing with a calligraphy pen, the art of frappuccinos is like writing with a crayon.) That she put the pitchers in the refrigerator too much!! That's right, after taking pains to go out of our ways and refrigerate the pitchers after every use, he told us to leave them on the counter, which is what we do anyway!! Of course, we couldn't SAY we did it anyway.

At any rate, right before I was about to leave, the district manager, and not the cafe guy, told me that she'd like to buy me a drink because she'd been watching me all day and I'd worked so hard and so well. (Being bought a drink by a manager, by the way, is the ultimate stamp of approval for lower employees in the B&N universe.) Well, there you go. I knew there was a reason why I like our district manager, she actually cares about employees as people, not just Barista #23.

Ahhh. And I have today off.