Tag Archives: coffee

Motorway Services: Where the bare minimum costs more

At the Service Station by Tom NashAh, the motorway service station. A British institution if ever there was one. They are nobody’s destination but still, usually thanks to our bladders, on long car journeys many of us can be found prying ourselves out of our vehicles and lumbering into these soulless strip-lighted bastions of aggressive capitalism like Zombies, ready to pay massively inflated prices for, well, everything… like the mugs we are.

Next time you find yourself at a Welcome Break or a RoadChef, take a look around. They’re great places to do a bit of people watching. You may just spot some of this lot:

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Coffee Shops: The queue starts back here, mate

Coffee Shops by Tom NashThree years ago, I got one of those loyalty card things from Cafe Nero. Earlier this month, I actually managed to fill it and get me a free mug of coffee. Nice. In the three weeks since, I’ve managed to fill another one.

Have I turned into everything I hate? Maybe, but if everyone else can be ignorant about their twattish behaviour, then why the fuck can’t I?

Anyway, much like I noted in my first post on nightclubs, it doesn’t matter where in the country you go, you will always find the same generic people in the same generic coffee house chains. They include:



The staff
They can either be far happier than someone working in the service industry should be, especially seeing as they deal pretty much exclusively with self-important lower middle-class arse-hats all day, or they are no eye-contact making monotoned zombies that make you feel about as welcome as the lovely folk in airport security. The further into a city you get, the more likely you are to meet the latter.

The laptop wanker
Some of you are probably thinking that I’m sitting in a coffee house while I write this, aren’t you? Yeah, well i’m not, because I’m not a complete prick. So this lot can’t afford to pay for a home internet connection but can buy overly expensive coffee everyday? Hmm. They always seem to be using a Macbook or a wanky new tablet device too, right? Double hmm.

The brat
No matter what the Daily Mail or the Torygraph tries to make you believe, society on the whole is kind. Your screaming child may receive polite smiles but inside everyone around you wishes you and your awful kids would fuck off so they can enjoy their drinks in peace. Look at the little fucker sipping their ‘babyccino’ (the person that named that needs to be poked in the eye with a shit-covered stick too, by the way). If it’s a boy, I bet their name is something like Hugo, Jonah or Rupert. A girl will be Beatrice, Regina or something equally as unfortunate or something hyphenated and its parents will insist on calling it by its full name. Better change that order to take-away.

The regular
This is the loser that has ‘their seat’ and ‘their table’, knows the names of all the members of staff and rather than find that depressing, is proud of the fact. If you’re sitting in ‘their seat’, best believe they will make the staff aware of this fact and they will do it with all the passive-aggression they can muster. Like the above entry, they don’t seem to have an ‘inside’ voice, meaning that both their order and their displeasure at the seating arrangement is bellowed at full volume, regardless of how busy the place is.

I’ll get my latte on later this week and jot down some more.

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