I heard a
really cool story from a customer the other day. She’s recently gone back to school, and her
cohort spent a week together on campus essentially getting to know each
other. The major theme of the week was
“Connections,” and the students had to bring a meaningful gift to share with an
assigned partner in the group. Over the
course of the week, they shared stories about themselves and their lives,
opening up to each other as the days passed.
One of the women in the group
eventually shared her history as an Olympic athlete, who had competed in two
recent Games. She had lost her father
years ago, but had kept his memory with her over the intervening years by
carrying, no matter where she went, a gift that he had given her… a piece of
the Berlin Wall. As she travelled the
globe, competing at the highest level sport has to offer, this piece of the
wall went everywhere with her… until earlier this year, when somehow she lost
it. The woman, as you can imagine, was
devastated.
As I mentioned earlier, each person
in the group had brought a gift to share with their assigned partner. Care to guess what the random person she was
paired up with had brought for his partner?
That’s right… a piece of the Berlin Wall. Of all the millions of things he could have
chosen to bring; heck, of all the different people within the group that she
could have been paired up with. I have
no idea what the odds against something like that happening are, but the number
is big… like really, really big. It’s
kinda spooky, really, although things like this happen every day, all over the
place… we’re just not always aware of them.
Are they evidence of that universal guiding force, creating moments like
this all over the place? Perhaps,
although with the number of interactions between people that happen every day,
things like this are bound to occur.
Regardless of your take, it really is a small, connected world, and one
that is getting smaller and more connected as time goes by.
The whole connections theme she
talked about really got me thinking… not so much about connections in the spiritual
sense, but about the smaller, more everyday connections that we make, or don’t
make, on a regular basis.
I’ve been working for Starbucks for
a really, really, ridiculously long time… almost exactly a third of my
life. I’d have never guessed when I
started how long I would last with the company, and in a lot of ways it’s been
waaaaay too long. That said, it’s been
pretty good for me in a lot of ways, and to this day there are still parts of
it that I really enjoy. As I said to
someone recently, the customers are the best part of the job… and, often, the
worst part of it as well. I’ve got some
amazing pain-in-the-ass customer stories from my years ( my favorite is still the woman who couldn’t
understand why I made her take her two dogs, strapped to her chest in a
snuggly, out of the store when, and I quote, “these dogs are far cleaner than
you (me) will ever be!!!”), but they really are few and far between. Way more common are the people who you see
every morning, on their way to their jobs, construction workers and lawyers,
doctors and nannies, students and movie stars… is there anything more
democratic, more universal, than the morning cup of coffee?
The conversations move at varying
speeds, 30 seconds at a time, but they all travel the same route… from “what
can we do for you this morning” to “it’s a grande dark, right?” to “the usual,
Marty?” to “hey, Jess, how was your trip?
Survived travelling with the kids, did you?” Impersonal and business-like becomes
friendly, as connections are made, and in some cases strengthened. Over the years I’ve gone for beers with
customers, added a few of them on Facebook (random aside… I’m shocked that Word
didn’t recognize Facebook as an actual word), even gotten interviews and jobs
through connections that I made at Starbucks.
Every time I go out and about in my neighbourhood, I run into someone,
or often many someones, that I know.
What’s amazing to me is that I live
in a city that has an incredibly strong reputation as a place where those
connections are hard to make. Vancouver,
apparently, is a totally shut down city where people stay in their own little
bubbles, heads down, earphones on, carefully getting from A to B without ever
actually making eye contact with anyone, and god forbid you actually speak to
someone you don’t know. Maybe I’m the
anomaly, but that’s never been my experience of this, or any other place. Maritimers are renowned for being friendly,
down-to-earth people, the opposite of we Vancouverites… and while I didn’t find
that to be wrong, people were really friendly there, I didn’t find it to be all
that different from here. People are
people, in my experience, no matter where they’re from… accents are different,
some customs change, but people are people.
Not too far down the road, I’m
going to be leaving Starbucks behind, finally.
My teaching career is about to fully engage, and I’ll move, on, leaving
the green apron behind. It will be
interesting to see how that changes my life; without those forced, every day
connections, will I slowly start to see the Vancouver everyone else does? Is the job what makes my experience
different, or is it something in me? Who
knows, I guess, the only way to answer a question like that is to wait and
see. I’d be surprised, though… maybe
it’s the small town in me, maybe it’s an inherent friendliness that others pick
up on, or maybe it’s my considerable charm and devastating good looks… ok, definitely
not that last one, but I think the first two fit. I am making a choice to keep those
connections going, and continue to make new ones. Why not?
Really, what is there to lose, by trying to be a friendly face to the
world?
