1. Sym­pathy

I went into a cafe the other day and asked for a table for 1. The waiter looked at me.
“you’re on your own!?” he said, reach­ing out and, well, hug­ging me. So much for the cold intimacies of emo­tional cap­it­al­ism (Illouz, 2007), this was warm sym­pathy. I would have been hap­pier to go unre­marked, though. 

2. Cash­less

I had to buy my train ticket at my des­tin­a­tion. The ticket office had been closed, the machine was broken. The National Express man told me off.

I got my debit card out to pay, chan­ging my mind ‘oh, I think I have cash’. The ticket seller said, no pay by card, ‘it saves me cash­ing up’.

Lazy, I think. But per­haps he’s not con­fid­ent at maths. Or maybe he’s got too much else to do at the end of the shift, and he might not be paid for the time it takes. I like to spec­u­late. These small encoun­ters reveal the nego­ti­ations and con­tin­gency of cus­tomer ser­vice work.

3. Reg­u­lars

Kay, in the Blues Café knows I want black cof­fee to take away, she remem­bers my choice after just 3 vis­its. She says ‘People never change their morn­ing cof­fee orders’.

I worked at ‘The Fox’ in 1996–7. Every Sunday morn­ing, the ‘sherry and a cherry’ woman came in: Harvey’s Bris­tol Cream, in a schooner, two glace cher­ries on a cock­tail stick; a pint of Land­lord for her hus­band. Fun­nier at least than sat­urday night man, bor­ing us at the bar for hours: he reckoned 2 pints and a bottle of lager and he was still under the drink-drive limit. 

Liz remem­bers the woman who she served mango sorbet with Rev­els[i] and a black cof­fee to, at 11am every morn­ing she worked at George and Davis icecream shop in the mid-90s.

Customer’s routines become part of cus­tomer ser­vice worker’s routines, and we remem­ber these frag­ments of our work­ing lives. 

[i] Rev­els explained by wiki­pe­dia. Liz pre­sumes that the Rev­els added a little unpre­dict­ab­il­ity to this woman’s daily routine.