Virgo Sun Pisces Moon

I’m drinking a chai tea right now as I type.

Do you know that I love drinking Chai?

I bought like the 300-teabags boxes from Costco.

Yes, ever since I was into Kundalini Yoga… I really adopted my love of Chai thanks to one particular teacher who always made it from scratch. Gotta give her credit where credit is due. Her recipe was bomb. She made the best Chai.

With a bit of Manuka Honey, a bit of almond milk… bliss.

So nourishing.

Supposedly also good for one’s liver?

Good for detoxing…

(Not a Doctor! Just anecdotal)

Ummm… what other drinks do I like?

Here’s my main coffee preferences:

• Almond milk mocha (not as much these days, but it used to be the default order)
• Almond milk cappuccino
• Almond milk latte
• Iced latte with almond milk

There’s no particular order. It depends on my mood. Sometimes weak (1 shot, instead of 2) in a medium size.

And I like the Starbucks matcha lattes, matcha frappes. But I’ve rarely visited Starbucks these days…

I’ve become a coffee snob since the last job where I did work as a Barista.

I didn’t know the differences before I worked that job… You can tell when there’s a lazy Barista. You can tell when they’re letting their beans go off. You can tell when they’ve burned the extraction. There’s a difference between a fine, woody “bitter” character intended in the flavour and bitter because they accidentally burned it bitter.

DO NOT buy coffee from a bakery in Australia. (Sorry bakeries!) But their way of making coffee is not an art.

Coffee is an ART.

Not that I care that much about latte art.

It’s the rest of the process that I was taught and now I can’t un-learn.

I do love it as a hobby even though I don’t have a machine at home.

But I feel like… it’s something I could get into… later on…

It was fun being a Barista and seeing all the equipment that is involved. There is a lot of cleaning, which is also why we haven’t got our own machine at home…

You have to keep the machine clean to maintain the crisp flavour. And for hygiene purposes too, of course.

But also — mochas. Now…

You have to get (brand) dark chocolate. You have to use the REAL CHOCOLATE.

There is a ratio. There is a very specific recipe. I am not typing it out on here!

You can also have fun and get (brand) chocolate balls… again, there is a way to do it. I haven’t seen anyone make Tik Toks the way that THE café actually does it. (Industry secrets)…

I will never tell!

But I can make it 😉

It’s actually really fun if you don’t have the pressure of 20 customers waiting in line for their order.

And, (brand) dark chocolate coated ice-cream cones… the waffle cones… I think I kind of miss making them? It was fun… very relaxing… you need a small bain marie… (quickly googled this, and the images are NOT what I am thinking of…) I don’t know, maybe you need to go to a wholesaler… okay, if you google search “small bain marie for chocolate”… that’s more along the lines of what I am thinking of…

I always loved the movie Chocolat.

So romantic.

Working in that environment was genuinely so fun for a while…

There’s part of it that I don’t miss, but there was some genuine moments of dopamine hits.

…

It took me so long to learn how to get the foam right for Australian coffees… (and Australians are FUCKING INSANE about their coffees! It is a CULTURAL PRIDE to have GOOD COFFEE in AUSTRALIA!!!) LOL… I think Australians do believe that Australia has the best coffee in the world and if you’re working as a Barista in Australia you HAVE TO UPHOLD THE STANDARDS and if you don’t, you’ll hear about it back from the customers so you’ll very, very quickly learn — YOU CAN’T MAKE SHIT COFFEE IN AUSTRALIA. (LOL!)

The customer will spit it out, “What the fuck!? Are we in America?! THIS COFFEE IS SHIT!!!” — Literally. Anyway, and then amongst those general standards now, I have even higher standards… LOL…

So I did learn the differences between the foam making for:

• Flat white
• Latte
• Cappucino
• Babycinos — also got their own instructions! Don’t let it go over 40 degrees you’ll burn the baby’s tongue!!!

I felt like such a “new” human being. Like my brain was like, “What the fuck is this?!” I never made these connections between my eyes, my hands, my fingers, my palms… (and ears… you start learning about the sounds of the steam…) eventually the really good Baristas just know, they don’t need a thermometer. They can feel it in their palms. They can hear the sound of the steam. The thermometer is there for the customers’ peace of mind that they know what they’re doing and they’re getting it right.

And there is an art to multi-tasking.

You’re a fucking good Barista if you can pour out an order of 20 coffees in 5 minutes.

It’s so much harder than people might think! That Barista has a PhD in coffee making, just no piece of paper to prove it. And all 20 coffees TASTE GOOD. That’s the point. It’s not the rush or the factory process. It’s an ART.

And you need the right equipment to help you do that too, of course. If you don’t have enough available slots in the machine… you can’t churn out those 20 coffees.

And there’s always something about to go wrong with the machine…

Plumbing issues.

General wear and tear…

So many little things go wrong all the time in hospitality…

And the stress!

We’re not doctors! We don’t work in ER! But if you don’t do this RIGHT — someone could get listeria or salmonella and DIE!!! It’s almost the same level of stress as working at a hospital because you don’t want to be the REASON to send someone TO hospital!

And then all the yelling and stress reactions! Come on! Let’s go!

Do it THIS way. Whoever the captain of the ship is of the day. It’s their shoulders.

…

A little bit like The Bear, yes…

It’s such a good show, so cathartic for anyone who’s worked in hospitality — in my opinion.

…

And, I learned a lot of visual merchandising… it wasn’t formal training, just by word of mouth from my co-workers. And I’m not sure where they learned it, just from their various work experiences.

There was no textbooks, no PowerPoints.

Just on the job, “Look at this mess, here is how we’re going to make it look pretty!”

There’s an intuitive reaction. If something’s not selling, let’s change this up.

If you can see where the customers are gravitating towards — okay, we need to redirect some things. What’s catching their eye? Where do they keep walking past?

Head Office can give all the marketing posters and whatever else they want. It’s the staff on the ground, on the frontlines, interacting with customers every day that can see the real time, real reactions and real behaviour of buying or not.

So much frontline feedback doesn’t actually get emailed…

It’s not in a google review. It’s just.. in that moment… heart to heart, human to human… was it really necessary to put in an email? Probably not… but it festers there as human disgruntlement.

Who will know?

Not A.I.

They’re not blogging their real feelings about a little random shop and little random things in their experiences.

Silent whispers, only a spiritually intuitive person who knows how to sense it — if they are working in Marketing, if they are working in Head Office — could probably take an educated guess and try to make some PowerPoint sense of it. And try to convince the board of decision makers to change the coarse of the ship.

But that rarely happens…

So why are they so “out to touch”?! Why are they in their “head office bubble”?!!

It’s very obvious when leadership has worked their way up or not.

It’s very obvious when leadership has previously had frontline experience.

The way they lead, the directions they give. The empathy they are able to hold for frontline workers.

It’s different. And it makes a difference. A genuine, human impact difference.

They’re generally so much more generous and compassionate.

…

How did my love of chai turn into this!?

I don’t know.

Long rants of nothing…

…

It was a good experience.

I don’t regret it.

I think back on those memories fondly.

And one day, someone gave me a gift.

They said, “It was someone who looked like a woman? But they had a voice really low like a man?! Do you know anyone like that?!”

Me, “A trans woman?! No, I can’t think of anyone that I know personally like that… maybe a past customer from another past workplace?” — I did think of ONE trans woman regular customer who maybe… I don’t know?

And at the time, I was just as confused.

“Were they really tall?!”

“No? Like, normal height?”

“Oh. Then I don’t know…”

Who would be giving me this gift? And why?

The coworker said, that that person said, “Can you please give this to Nicole?” Like they knew me.

And I received the gift. I liked it. I think I even posted about it on Instagram?

It was a sweet gift. I still have it.