Annoying habits of Londoners #7: working in a coffee shop

Mike Pollitt | Tuesday 17 April, 2012 12:44

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Two types of people sit in front of laptops in coffee shops. Those who are there to work, and those who are there to pretend that they are working.

The first group can be recognised by their smart clothing, their determined mien, their choice of coffee (like their souls – small and black), and the fact that they are in and out within an hour. These people are productive, successful, and gainfully employed. The coffee shop is to them a caffeine pit stop on the way to or from some more formal professional appointment. They favour the mass market, impersonal efficiency of Starbucks or Costa. The coffee is fuel in a well-greased machine.

The second group, by contrast…the second group are an altogether lamentable class. Freelancers, semi-freelancers, pseudo-freelancers and working-for-free lancers. Students, dreamers, wasters and pet-projecters. A procrastination of idlers, pretending to toil.

They drink all manner of outré concoctions, the complexity of which are inversely proportional to the amount of work they manage to get done. For you cannot tell me that someone who orders a large cappuccino with flavoured syrup and chocolate topping is about to make serious progress with anything.

These ne’er-do-wells frequent a different sort of place. For them, distraction is not a danger, it’s a secret desire. Hence the decor must be interesting, the clientele varied, the music novel. I’ve seen coffee places in Dalston with a DJ playing at 1 o’clock in the afternoon, for christsakes. On a Tuesday. And people were sitting round pretending to work.

Work they weren’t! I should know, because I wasn’t either.

Image – Stebbi póstur on Flickr under Creative Commons

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Email: michael.pollitt@snipelondon.com

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