Someone Else's Ivy
When they couldn’t keep their hands off each other, we invented Sexual Harassment Tuesdays. Every Tuesday, as long as they were out of sight of the customers, they could snap as many bras and give as many wedgies as they wanted, thus enabling us on every other day of the week, to say “save it for Tuesday.” If they came back early from their OSHA-mandated paid fifteen-minute breaks, I would send them out again, saying “The eight hour day is not a benevolent gift from the owning class. People fought and died to get you breaks like these, don’t you dare disrespect their memories.”
“OSHA, what?” They asked, reaching around to try to snap my bra straps, “Is that some kind of whale?”
“Look it up,” I would respond. “There are students your age leading revolutions is other countries.”
The trick to being a manager, I found, is never asking an employee to do something while it appears that you yourself are not busy. So that before I said things like, “polish all the copper table-tops, please. Now, please,” I would pick up a stack of cups and wander toward the kitchen until the kid started polishing. Or, bellowing from the office, “Run down the street and pick me up some lunch from that Chinese place,” I would make sure to have a spread-sheet open on the computer screen in front of me.
But they worked hard. I tracked the sales every night in a rudimentary way, and they never went disastrously down over those months. And the young people in my employ worked hard at becoming little human beings. James studied for the SAT and Deion for the GED. Clarissa had her first art opening; James took his girlfriend for an abortion. Deion read Joyce’s Ulysses behind the counter. Andrew attended AA every week and took a class at the Harvard Extension School, and Amanda went to her first high-school party where everyone was drunk. Kat decided she wanted to attend the University of Colorado for photography and asked me to help her with her application essay. Amanda had gotten into college early decision, but then, through a combination of teenage angst and experimentations, started failing all her high school classes. I started tutoring her in an attempt to get her graduated and off to college before they rescinded their offer. And I had a great time.
In January, I took two weeks unpaid vacation to visit my mother, who was living overseas. While I was away, Susan, the General Manager of the other nearby franchise, had to come in to our café to cover some of my shifts. She had, I think, become the de facto Regional Manager in the same way that I had ended up the acting General Manager at the Harvard Square café. As it turned out, Susan had a slightly more formal approach to management than I did. The first thing she did after I left, was to rip down all the post cards and newspaper clippings and little coffee-cup artwork that we had hung in the kitchen. She told my kids that instead of the work of local artists, frames with prints of coffee and coffee beans would be going up on the walls of the café. And then, she started in about the music.
Someone once told me that all chain stores are required to play music constantly. And this is the reason: in case of a hold up, when the gunman says on the floor or stick em up, or whatever gunmen say, and the whole crowd including the manager or the night clerk goes silent, there will be music playing to sort of ease the tension. So that really, the music must be considered a safety measure, like the sign on the door that says less than fifty dollars in register. At our café, we were accustomed to rotating the CD selection according to the musical tastes of the employee who was in my good graces that particular day. The rule was that he or she could play whatever she wanted at a reasonable volume and providing there were no coherent obscenities, and as long as it were understood that anyone playing The Eagles, The Doors or Kelly Clarkson would be fired on the spot. But Susan introduced five corporation-approved CDs, and told the kids that they would be the only music played in the café. Ever.
