Hey guys!

Sorry about that last random post of a picture of my dog, lol. My phone kinda whacked out on me. Anyways, I’m back from hiatus kinda. I’ve still been drinking lots of coffee and tea and still have the same amount of crazy stories. School, work, and everything else in between seriously takes up my entire life. Ahh.. sweet adolescense.

It’s funny the assumption all baristas get that we are addicted to coffee and drink it all day. I can recall so many times when I greet customers a friendly and chipper hello and they respond with, “Jeez, you must be on that caffeine binge!” Um.. no not really. Can’t a person just be naturally chipper and friendly to customers? I mean, it is my job to be nice. Unless you’re an asshole then expect me to put decaf in your latte. Lol jk. 

No really.

But in my 3 years of being a barista, I think I suddenly started to get addicted to iced teas. In particular, green iced teas. I was never normally the kind of person that needed to go to a coffee shop early every morning in order to start my day, but I’m surprisingly becoming one. For the past 4 weeks of class session, I’ve been stopping by starbucks near my school to get my iced tea. Along with a healthy granola bar. I’ve discovered it’s really hard for me to function throughout the day if I don’t have those. I’m telling you, I’ve NEVER been that person before. And quite frankly, it’s freaking me out. I make coffee and tea for almost 8 hours a day at work so why the hell am I craving it outside of work?

So now when customers accuse me of being on a caffeine binge, I can actually tell them yes. I’ve drank at least 2 venti iced green teas in the past hour. Excuse my cheerfulness.  

We have this old, chunky, caucasian male regular named Gene. He tells the most interesting, yet ridiculous stories and even though he’s getting old, he still has a lot of spunk. He’s a cute old man, to say the least and I’m always happy to see him when he orders his chocolate smoothie in a venti cup. :)

But oddly enough, he can still be kinda weird. He’ll constantly tell these crazy ass stories about his life and we can only imagine if they’re actually true or not. Then he’ll talk about things like his new dog they just adopted, or his health problems. Sometimes I think he forgets who I am, even though I’m the one who rings up his drink 80% of the time. Like one time, I asked him what he was doing and he told me he was listening to Japanese music. I got excited and told him, “I listen to a lot of Japanese music as well!” Since I am a huge anime nerd. But then he goes into this whole shpeel about this Japanese folk music that he was listening to that was derived from an old Chinese song about a man who sings about a woman he can’t be with and so forth. I quietly stood there awkwardly waiting to let him know I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, and that the Japanese music I listen to are mostly from cartoons, but he was so into it that he kept going on and on and on. I did eventually tell him that I listen to Japanese pop music. And that’s when he gave me a blank stare, but proceeded further to convince me to listen to this Japanese folk song. Yeah.. I never did.

This past weekend we gave Gene the random customer voice survey. It actually did print out on his purchase, but he’s also a regular so we thought why the hell not. He’s always on his laptop here and he’s a regular so he should be saying nice things, right? As my shift lead David explained to him what he had to do to fill it out, Gene chuckled. He said, “I can think of so many things to write about you guys.” We all stood there smiling and nervously laughing because we didn’t know if that was meant be positive or not. As my shift lead started to walk away from the register, Gene says, “I’d say something like the girls here are wearing too much clothing, hahaha.” 

So I was working with my sorority sister Michelle and we both stood there super awkwardly and laughed. There was another woman in line and she gave my shift lead a look and my shift lead just laughed nervously to Gene’s joke and gave the woman a, “I don’t know what the fck just happened” look.

Ah yes… Gene is an interesting one. He told me he was writing a book too. I wonder how that’s going.  

browncollarbarista: