Sometimes I think back on the time I spent working as a barista, and it seems SO STRANGE to me that “coffee shop AU” has become synonymous with narratives that are low on conflict, high on wholesome romance. During the year I spent working at a coffee shop:
A coworker of mine took a bunch of psychedelics, walked through some strangers’ plate-glass door, and threatened them with a bowie knife, leading to his arrest and imprisonment (and, needless to say, a late opening for the coffee shop that morning).
Another coworker, an ex-military type with a young wife and a new baby, decided to smoke up for the first time ever with two other mutual coworkers, in the back of one of their trucks; and ended up having a three-way with them which ended his marriage.
I had a nervous breakdown, stopped being able to eat food or hold conversations, and ended up sleeping on my coworker’s couch for three weeks before she finally called my parents to come collect me.
Multiple store managers were fired for embezzlement. (Reminder: this was within the space of a single year.)
Yet another coworker, who was seventeen at the time, started dog-sitting for a couple of regulars in their (I’m guessing) early 50s, and ended up in an ongoing creepy and incidentally illegal ~relationship~ with them both.
Various employees discovered, in the course of cleaning the bathrooms: couples fucking in the bathrooms; junkies passed out in the bathrooms; drunks puking in the bathrooms; both adults and children weeping in the bathrooms; a woman bleeding all over the bathroom from a gash in her throat (??); a dude standing in the middle of the bathroom floor and pissing in the opposite direction from the toilet, so that when the employee opened the unlocked door she got piss all over her (????).
The owner of the bridal shop across the street was exposed as both abusive toward her employees and also cooking the books, which led to my coffee shop taking on a couple of untrained and weirdly conservative bridal shop workers for a few months while the bridal shop was shuttered and sold to new owners. Later the larcenous former bridal shop owner came down with some horrible disease which caused her to lose both her hands.
There was a regular universally referred to as “Sketchy Steve,” who came in at 7am for a three-shot latte with room for Seagrams 7, and dealt drugs to all us baristas. I actually, at one point (I cannot believe I was this stupid), went inside Sketchy Steve’s house, and allowed him to spend like half an hour showing me his collection of découpaged outlet plates and also soliciting me for sex while I uncomfortably yet studiously declined.
Right before I started, the store manager had walked off the job in the middle of a shift, and ¾ of the employees had walked out after him. None of them ever returned.
Like, working on the front lines of food service was the most operatically sordid professional experience I have ever had, and one of the most surreal; and it is hilarious to me that THAT, of all jobs, is the one that has come to stand for soft-focus domestic romance in fandom circles.
This is the Coffee Shop AU we deserve.
Two of my managers got fired for having an affair with each other. There was this guy I never really talked to, so one time I see him and ask how his weekend was. He says “I wanted to drop some acid but I couldn’t find any.” Never saw him again.
I had a friend whose manager used to sit in the backroom doing lines of coke before opening at 7am. It was and I quote ‘the only way to deal with this shit’.
My own manager, who was heavily pregnant at the time, told an asshole customer to take their latte and shove it up their arse, before walking out and promptly going into labor.
We had homeless people sleeping in our dumpsters who used to throw the trash back out at us when we opened the lid.
I have myself uttered the phrase “M’am, I am the manager” after they dumped a cream cake over my head because it wasn’t what they ordered except it was. They even pointed at it first and said “that one”.
I had a customer piss themselves out of defiance when we asked them to leave. Then when the police were called they did it again, like some vengeful piss camel.
I’m telling you friends, I have stood at the precipice of hell, I have stared into the void and plummeted into the depths of humanity and it tips less than 20%.
Found it. The origins of everyone starting to send me the phrase Vengeful Piss Camel instead of Crucifix Nail Nipples for a short time. Amazing. I do not miss catering.
Apparently we should shift our soft low-conflict AUs to bookshops bc in the year I worked in a second-hand bookshop literally nothing happened except I read and bought a lot of books, except of course bookshops barely exist anymore because Amazon.
I’ve seen some posts going around on what not to write in fantasy, many of which amount to:
Don’t write evil kings.
Don’t write people who are evil for the sake of evil.
Don’t write bullies.
Don’t write villains at all actually.
Don’t write mentors.
Don’t let your characters learn how to do hard things on their own though.
Don’t write people on adventures.
Don’t write people fighting evil governments.
Don’t write any fantasy species ever written before.
Don’t write any fantasy trope ever written before.
Don’t write any fantasy plot ever written before.
Just… don’t fucking write fantasy I guess??
And this is such utter bullshit, my friends.
We do need more originality and diversity in fantasy, but we don’t need to remove everything that fantasy is and has been in the process.
(Especially, especially, when diversity is being included in traditionally cishet white male protagonist fantasy stories.)
Maybe the chosen one with special magic powers and a royal bloodline going on a quest with a group of friends to defeat the evil king has been done before with a white cis man a thousand times over, but how many times has a black trans woman got to go on that adventure?
Maybe elves and orcs have been written into the dust, but they still make great templates on which to tell stories with original twists, and there’s nothing about them that stops a good, emotional story from hitting you straight in the heart.
Maybe dragons have been done by every writer ever to write fantasy, but you know what? Dragons are fucking awesome, my dudes. Many readers are always gonna love them.
Maybe we have told the same fantasy stories over and over again, but every step you take away from the known template is a step you have to spend more and more exposition on before the reader will understand your original creation.
So don’t let anyone make you feel like that your (inclusive) fantasy story is too ‘traditional’ to be good. As long as you produce a well written story you’ve put your heart into, it’ll be a story many readers will love.
People, please be careful. There are also people tracking children and people and putting bids on them based on their profile pictures on whatsapp, tracking and kidnapping them. Especially young children, so please be cautious, especially parents who have their children as their profile pictures.
Please pass this on to everyone so that they are aware of the danger. I don’t how it is all around the world but I know it can’t just be here so please please spread the word. Thank you.
I keep getting these like twice a week. Please reblog!
I get these constantly good to know my instinct to block them were good ones
can’t bring her home quite yet 😩 apparently she’s not eating on her own, which for rabbits is a big issue, and is being “extremely uncooperative” (i.e. mauling the fuck out of them) with syringe feeding. I was like yup, sounds like my girl!!
they’ll call again in a couple hours to tell me whether I can pick her up.
I’m at the vets and they’re like “This Animal Sucks Take Your Nightmare Rabbit And Go”
the vet’s pretty young (probably a student?), and she was like “hey…… you wanna look at the organ we took out???”, & I was like “…..👀👀 I really really do”
Big Gay Dracula Does a Shitpost 