Highly Trained Starbucks Baristas

Then there is Eric. Attending local community college because his mother is paying. Maybe she is paying to get him out of the house. Can she really be so delusional to think that he is getting an education.
I once asked him how his final were going. I was also desperately looking for some topic of commonality, where I might get an actual dialogue going. Does an exchange of more than three sentences count as a dialogue?
Eric told me his art in the community class wasn’t having any final. The students did so poorly on the mid the teacher decided to give them a take home final. What!!!! These kids don’t crack open a book, don’t prepare for class, hardly show up for class. So if you get your name on the roster and don’t drop out you pass, right?
That’s pretty much how is works at Davenport College (oh, now they are a university, supposedly). You can’t expect the students to read anything, plagiarism is okay, and just move them along because it is all about money. Learning something is incidental.
Back to Eric. He devoted himself to drugs and alcohol. Oh yes, he worked hard on developing his gay relationships. Freshman year behind him, when asked, he said his major was Liberal Arts. I pushed to try to find out what particular subject he was focused on. (I didn’t want to outright call him an idiot – these guys cry easily.) “Uh, my advisor told me it’s liberal arts.”
Okay. And you are having problems just getting the basics out of the way.
Eric was a pretty good espresso bar person, if you didn’t mind the mess. He was extremely messy with unwashed pictures filling the counter, steamed milk overflowing everywhere, syrup drips all over, hand sink crowed with milk jugs. And it’s not like he was so busy – he always functioned this way, even when it was deadly slow.
I particularly liked the way he constantly fussed with his hair and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Either allergies or drug abuse. Never used that hand sink. Just kept working. Ah, what a tasty beverage.
And take a few shots of espresso to get you going ’cause you were out drinking again and didn’t get any sleep. It’s your personal espresso bar, right?