No Working Team Quite Compares to an All-Women Barista Crew

Welcome back to Saturday Night Social.

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It sounds like an insufferable fun fact to deploy—and so I rarely do—but for a brief period, I was a full-time barista in the biggest bookshop in Europe, Waterstones Piccadilly in London. 

Now, it sounds romantic, but this was one of the most miserable times of my life. I’d just moved to London with nary a plan and a fraction of the kind of savings that most of my college peers around me had already squirreled away; I had just quit another job working as a receptionist at Soho House after it took me about two weeks to realize how much I fucking hated the people at Soho House; and I was unable, no matter how hard I tried, to break into the journalism job market. What’s more, I was dealing with some of the worst clientele, ranging from European tourists with giant Union Jack bags that would cut you off as you asked them what you wanted to order, to posh geriatric men donning Barbour that would say “Good girl” when you bagged for them the exact scone they wanted you to grab. (True story.) 

But! For a good month in my time there, I was part of the best team I have ever worked in. (With the exception of at Jezebel, OFC <3)

Anyone who’s worked a single day in customer service will know it’s impossible to find yourself a team that can work together, goof around, and—throughout it all—get the job done. If you’re lucky, you’ll get one of these things. If you’re super lucky, you’ll get two.

What also usually happens is that openers (who are in charge of getting there early, setting things up) will think that closers didn’t do enough; closers (who are in charge of tidying, and locking things up) will think openers complain too much; and everyone in between (who work a shift, but have to neither open nor close) will have mastered the art of deflecting blame, and keeping up the charade of the great Openers v. Closers war. 

But as it turns out, all you really need for a good working team is one composed of all women. And I guess, consequently, no male managers.

Now, when I first joined the Piccadilly coffee shop, there was a manager—mind you, a gay man from Italy, but still a dude. Nothing on him, and he was a great guy, but after he left, the cogs got smoother than I could have ever imagined.

In fact, without the watchful eye of a manager, we seemed to get everything done at a fraction of the pace. And instead of assigning everyone to the same exact job throughout the course of a shift (i.e. one person stays on the register the whole time, another on the espresso machine, another on the ovens), we seemed to all flow effortlessly between each other, picking up whatever job needed done, without stepping on any toes.

Most fascinatingly, during this time, we mastered the art of picking up each other’s partially done tasks, just because it would logistically make sense. Like, if someone started making a three-step drink on the coffee machine, only to have to clean up a spill on the other side of the room halfway through, the person on the register would finish up what they’re doing before helping them finish the drink. If things were ultra busy with a line out the door, everyone built a de-facto assembly line of making sure shit got done. And let’s say someone realized you’d needed to restock the straws. They would barely be getting ready to go and look for a box of them before someone set one in front of them, all because they grabbed it while they were in the room to stock another thing. (“I thought you might need this at some point!”) A man would never.

And while you might think that throughout this jumble of waltzing and huffing between each other we’d be yelling, “Can you grab this?” and “Can you finish that?”—you’d be wrong. Instead, we were conversing about people, places, things, ideas, aka quite literally anything under the sun—and very rarely about the work we were actually doing. I guess they do say women are great multitaskers.

Alas, the good times couldn’t last forever, and it took about a month for the higher-ups to clock that we were working without a manager—and thus, assign us one. And who did they get for us, might you ask? Surprise! Another. Dude. What’s more is this was a man that shirked work, pulled rank, and asked you to do petty jobs just so you could look busy. It took us about an hour to miss the good old days.