that cup of tea

I was having my breakfast at a coffee shop this morning, and as with most coffee shops there are middle aged, sometimes even old, folks taking orders for drinks. Sounds pretty normal right? But I wonder how many of us actually think about what they do? Let's see: first they take orders for drinks, then they relay the orders to the people in drinks stall who makes them, then they bring the drinks to the customers and collect the payment for the drink.

Seems pretty simple, no?

Now imagine this: it's a weekend, during the peak hour. The whole place is filled with customers, some waiting for you to bring them what they ordered, perhaps with a look of impatience on their faces, maybe even outrightly demanding the reason for you taking this long to bring them their orders, others trying to get your attention so they can place their orders and here you are, trying remember that the person in yellow ordered 2 cups of tea and a cup of kopi-o, that lady in white ordered 3 cups of teh-o with less sugar, that family over there ordered 2 breakfast sets ith a cup of tea and a cup of milo, serving the orders as fast as you can and having to calculate how much 2 cups of tea, 1 cup of kopi-c cost. All that and you have to balance so many cups of beverages on a tray whilst navigating through the coffee shop fraught with so many potential hazards, like the leg of that chair sticking out or the fact that at any time some ill-behaved child would run into you.

Not so easy now, is it?

So the next time you get pissed over the coffee shop assistant being slow, take a good look at the crowd in the coffee shop and try to understand that sometimes (I say "sometimes" because they are also times where the coffee shop assistants are just plain lazy), it's not that they don't want to bring you that cup of tea, it's just that there are just too many customers for them to cope with.