Star(bucks) People

I spent a few productive hours on Tuesday morning hooked into the WiFi in Starbucks while the o2 store next door tried to fix my comatose mobile phone.

That much time in a coffeeshop makes for an interesting people watching exercise. Who are you, my Starbucks-bound friends, and what brings you to this high street store at 10.30 on a Tuesday morning?

A sad man in a business suit sat at the next table to mine for the best part of an hour, staring out of the window and occasionally scribbling a brief note in the dog-eared pad that sat beside him. Who are you, sad suited man? Are you a small part of the chaos in the City, escaping to your coffee-house haven to decide what to do next?

A group of screaming tweenie girls whirled in like banshees about 10.45, grabbed all the croissants left in the place and swept out, a distant cry of “he said WHAT” dissolving in their wake. The sad man watched them go and made a few notes on his pad.

A woman with a laptop came in and settled on one of the large twin sofas. We caught each other’s eye briefly, but she looked away before I could offer a co-conspiratorial smile. Two other women with enormous but empty pushchairs wheeled in and sat around her on the sofas, sipping milkless coffees and talking a bit too loudly for the comparative quiet of the morning. The woman with the laptop ignored them stoicly for a while but eventually gathered up her things and departed.

As she walked past me I couldn’t help noticing that her shoes needed reheeling.

By now the sad man was engaged in an industrious spot of notepad-scribbling. He barely looked up as two twenty-something creative types walked in, all trendy jeans and spiky hair. “I can’t believe she put that forward,” one of them was saying. “I mean, isn’t that exactly what she suggested for the campaign last year?”

Curiosity made me watch them to the counter, where they ordered eight takeaway coffees between them and left, trays in tow. One of them ran into a pushchair on the way out; he didn’t stop to apologise, but the women on the sofas barely noticed.

The sad man stopped scribbling again. Elbows on the table and chin in his hands he was staring out of the window and slowly sloshing the dregs of his coffee around the bottom of the cup. With a sigh, he got up to leave.

“Have a nice day,” I said to him on impulse, giving him my best-and-brightest smile, the one I keep for special occasions and presents I really wanted.

He looked around for a moment, surprised, before focusing on me. “Oh… thanks,” he said, and smiled back.

And then he was gone, and I got back to work.