So I’m doing something new today. I’m here at Caribou Coffee in Royal Oak, Michigan, and I’m going to journal what I’m thinking, what I’m seeing. It’s sort of like me talking to you, only you have no chance to say anything and you can’t tell me to shut up. I have no real reason to be here except to come here with my Mac to see what the hype about being Mac user in a coffee shop is all about.
I set out to be your typical coffee shop Apple geek, and I think I’ve succeeded — wearing Adidas tear-away track pants (because you can never tell when you’re gonna have to suddenly join a basketball game, or a gang fight), U of M long sleeve t-shirt, Asics running shoes. I have no black turtleneck, sorry. I have my MacBook Pro on my lap, my Blackberry next to me, and my Plantronics 640 affixed in my left ear. I’ve ordered a dark roast coffee along with a slice of pumpkin bread. I have showered and generally look kempt.
It’s not too busy here — maybe 10 guests not including myself. There is some very generic music playing through the overhead speakers; I can’t tell what it is. If this were my coffee shop, I’d select something more ambient, something with more of a zing, something that had a swear word somewhere buried deep in the lyrics so I could snigger in my back office because I’m 5 years old and I heard a man say “shit” over the speakers to my customers. They have the holiday decorations in full bloom here: seasonal coffee, chocolate-covered coffee beans in Christmas — er, I mean, HOLIDAY — packaging, plastic reindeers full of candy.
Every year, the overcommercialization of Christmas bothers me earlier. This year it’s before Thanksgiving. I think I’m a few days earlier than last year.
There’s a guy at the table next to me using his Dell laptop. On his table also sit two books about the rules of contract law. He keeps looking at my computer like he wants to talk to me about it. He’s certainly not reading much about contract law. He’s working in MS Word on some complex document with lots of tiny print and smatterings of colored boxes all over the place. His laptop is big, old. He has headphones on and has just launched MusicMatch — perhaps the worst music player software on the planet Earth — and picked a track to play. He prefers orange highlighters over the more traditional yellow. Draped across the back of his chair is a pilled (yes, really) green fleece that looks like it has a religious aversion to being washed. Unsavory. The guy, by way of contrast, looks reasonably well dressed: jeans, Ecco shoes, a nice grey knit sweater with black buttons. Sweater looks woolly to me though, which means itchy. I don’t like wool much anymore. I used to, but then we got into a big fight and it still owes me money, so we don’t talk.
Yeah.
There sits another gentleman at a diagonal to the Unfocused Lawyer dressed in a UM hat, khakis, tan socks and Sperry Topsiders. He’s very absorbed in the sports section of today’s paper, deliberating heavily on the plethora of Bo Schembechler articles. This guy has glasses and I’d put him around 45 - 47, which, if he does indeed have an affinity for Bo, makes perfect sense, age demographic-wise. He has no computer with him, which clearly means he’s a luddite who probably shovels dirt or destroys technology out of fear and ignorance.
I like profiling people irresponsibly. Not only is it fun, I think I’m good at it. Can this bag me $250K per year? No? Shit.
There’s a college-age girl one table down from the Unfocused Lawyer. She’s reading something I can’t quite see (and that bothers me, because when I’m journaling, then dammit, I’m researching on a very basic level and I need access to things, access to facts), and she’s been here for about 25 minutes. Thing is, she’s sitting here in a huge, puffy down jacket, and I would be literally melting if I had that jacket on in a place like this for that long.
Someone just ordered a “Fa La Latte” and the barrista just hollered it out. “Fa La Latte.” I couldn’t order that out loud without having to suppress the urge to go shoot myself afterwards.
Unfocused Lawyer keeps looking at my Mac. You’d be surprised how often that happens. The MacBook Pros are solid metal, sleek, and the OS looks so different from Windows, which is probably all most people really know. I don’t want to hear anyone tell me that hardware/technology design doesn’t influence desirability. It does, and that’s why AAPL’s share price is over thrice that of Dell, and Apple, financially, is now a larger company than Dell. Even just last weekend I have a guy tell me the MacBook Pro is the nicest-looking laptop on the globe, and he was using a tiny Sony notebook. Design matters, kids. PCs aren’t Volvos anymore: boxy but good doesn’t cut it.
UM Bo Mourner just sneezed twice so violently it occurred to me he might fall from his chair, but thankfully he did not and instead harnessed that newly-surfaced energy to go and get another mug of coffee and put more cream & sugar in it. Well done, sir. You are a resourceful lad. And me? I’m smug and condescending, sitting here with my laptop.
Another older guy, about 50, has come in and sat between Unfocused Lawyer and UM Bo Mourner. He has brought with him one gigantic three-ring binder stuffed full of pages, about six magazines, another, smaller blue three-ring binder, a yellow interoffice mail envelope, two yellow legal pads, two separate piles of documents and his cell phone, which is standard model and doesn’t have any camera or smartphone functionality. He has an entire tree’s worth of paper on his desk. He’s dressed in tan Dockers, some Rockport-esque shoes, a blue/white plaid button-up. He wears glasses and keeps his salt-and-pepper hair very short, almost military. He’s a bit overweight. As I continue to watch him, he’s taking the piles of documents, which are actually photographs, and arranging them in the larger three-ring binder. He seems very intent, focused. Unfocused Lawyer might want to talk to him instead of staring at me and my computer all the time.
Another guy has come in and sat down quite a few tables away. He has a laptop too, but mine can beat up his. I can’t tell what he’s doing except for working on his laptop and wearing a purple short-sleeve shirt. He has headphones on his table, but perhaps the current jazz selection piping over the shop’s stereo system is OK with him. I put this guy in his late 30s/early 40s. His hair has thinned quite a bit, and what he has left he wears very short, which is a smart decision. He wears round glasses that look good on him. I admire people who look good in glasses because I look something like a very tall retard who broke into a 7-11 and managed to steal a pair of glasses and is wearing them because I know eventually my parents will find me, catch me, remove my glasses on account of them looking retarded and then take me home and put me back into my own little closet in the kitchen, where I will succumb to such overt loneliness and solitude that I go all Nell on them one day, inventing my own nonsense language an breaking out of my confines to go live in the forest forever. Later, I will be found in a McDonald’s alongside the highway, as the forest was way too cold for me and god, Nell really was special and people just ignored her, misunderstood her, like they do with all things of unique beauty and energy in the world.
My pumpkin bread is dry. I don’t find it satisfying at all.
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