Crossing the Line

“I’d like a double tall, half-caf….hold on a sec…no not you….what?....double tall, half-caf., low foam, high fiber…No way! I can’t believe he said that to you!....Wait, where’s my latte? Do you need me to repeat my order?” If your blood is not as boiling as the hot coffee I’m about to spill on all of those line-clogging cell phone junkies, I’m sorry that my little dramatization has gone over your head. Standing in line (or “on line” if you’re in New York where everyone else seems to be able to see some imaginary line on the ground leading up to every cashier, ticket window, and gyro cart) is frustrating enough without having your ears assaulted by the conversational table scraps of a would-be socialite who may as well be gabbing with the time-teller for as much substance as she’s transmitting through that cancer machine. I know this sounds harsh, but let’s be honest, if you’re waiting for someone to make change for a $20 because you just couldn’t live without a fresh role of Bubble-Tape, you’re probably not having philosophical debate about Jesus v. the Constitution with the person on the other end.

Not that I have a Marxist regard for service employees, but I find this behavior to be rude, largely because it is demeaning. Who do these people think they are that the poor barrista (Fritalian for “slave-wage coffee jockey”) doesn’t deserve their undivided attention when trying to serve them efficiently so they will get back out onto the street where they will be everyone else’s problem? If we’re honest with ourselves, you guys and gals would be cleaning that barrista’s toilets if you did not have someone else’s money to spend on gourmet French roast and oversized sunglasses. So it seems the least we could do is show a little human courtesy to the folks by whose good graces you are saved from having to figure out how to work that damn contraption in your kitchen with the glass pourer-dealie and the pouch with the black powdery-thingies in it.

I raise this issue because we’ve stumbled onto a societal prisoner’s dilemma. I too would like to be pouring over every detail of what I had for breakfast with whoever accidentally hits the “talk” instead of the “ignore” button when they see me calling. But I refrain because I’m not self-absorbed enough to commit the offensive behavior discussed above and still sleep at night (although who could sleep when there are so many interesting things to say about the piece of chewing gum I saw on the sidewalk this afternoon?). Other than personal shame (which, to be honest, has not been much of a barrier in the past), what’s my incentive not to pick up the phone as well? At least then I’d have something to distract me while Liz Smith over there narrates the menu to her conversation partner to help her decide which Egg McMuffin will go best with a Bloody Mary. And thus the problem snowballs to the point where our poor cashier has capitalized on our absent-mindedness to embezzle more than the GDP of Mauritania out of the change drawer.

Not that I’m shilling for Visa, but to illustrate my point, see if you can spot the most offensive person in this ad: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6332303939470321646&q=visa+commerical+food+court&total=2&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0&hl=en . I’ll give you 2 guesses. Then I’m calling in the soup nazi.