The queue for my morning coffee was short but slow-moving. I was next but one up, but the woman in pole position seemed to have ordered an awful lot of takeaway coffees, each one subtly different. They weren’t being made so much as constructed. Cappuccino, latte, oat, skinny, hot, wet, permutations thereof, etc, etc. You know the kind of thing. The queue lengthened behind me. I noted a Just Eat bloke standing there and was vaguely cheered that he was being paid enough to afford a Caffè Nero coffee. But then the woman in front of me was served her drink and it dawned on me that the eight takeaway coffees weren’t for her – they were all for Mr Just Eat. Not for him to enjoy, of course, but to deliver unto others.
Many questions came to me in my woozy pre-caffeinated state, not least WHO IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY BLOODY WELL GETS COFFEE DELIVERED? Second question: how could there be anything left in the cups by the time he got to whichever weirdos had ordered them? I’d have done a great deal of spilling even if I’d only had to walk them next door. What kind of Cirque du Soleil standard of act must this guy have been to keep them upright on his bike? Perhaps he had some kind of gimbal mechanism in his bag to keep them level, designed by the same people who make snooker tables for superyachts.
Had I been tasked with transporting them, there would have been zero fluid remaining in any of the eight cups on arrival. I’d be reduced to setting them on the pavement and refilling them by decanting the lukewarm, cappuccino/latte/americano/skinny/oat/hot/wet coffee mixture out of the bag. Pop the lids on and Bob’s your uncle. Sure I’d get away with it.
But seriously, to go back to my original question, WHO IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY BLOODY WELL GETS CUPS OF COFFEE DELIVERED? I suppose it must be an odd mix of folk, consisting of the extremely lazy and the extremely busy. Perhaps you can be both. I wonder where the eight coffees I saw being prepared for transport were heading. A coffee morning, perhaps? Are they still a thing? I’m not sure I’ve heard mention of one since about 1982.
No, presumably these coffees were destined for an office, in which case it all starts to make sense. I strongly suspect this is down to a very modern squeamishness about asking anyone – even (or especially) the most junior member of staff – to go out and get some coffees. Once it was the norm; now not so much. I haven’t asked anyone to make or fetch me a coffee in years. To ask a junior colleague would feel like nothing less than a microaggression. Two weeks running, broadcasting from the BBC in Birmingham, a studio engineer has gone off – unbidden, I should emphasise – to make me a cup of tea. I’ve all but fallen to their feet in gratitude, and no small amount of shame. I’d be far more likely to ask my programme editor, or channel controller, or indeed the director general himself to get me a coffee than I would somebody on work experience. I’m so glad the world wasn’t like this 30 years ago because when I was on work experience, making tea and coffee was just about the only way I could make myself useful.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not moaning. I make and fetch an awful lot of hot drinks, and I’m happy to do so. My accumulation of Costa points and Caffè Nero stamps has surely been noted at the HQs of both companies. But if the answer is sending a stranger on an ebike working for a foreign tech company to do the coffee round, then we’re asking the wrong question. Workers of the world, unite – and send the boss out to fetch the coffees instead.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
