Invisible People

I’ve been making it a practice to watch how the customers in Strarbucks interact with the people who take their orders and make their coffee.

Last week, one guy got to the counter and simply said “Grande Bold.” He barely looked up. Being a mother, I couldn’t help but add “Please” to the end of his sentence. Force of habit.

The next woman approached the counter and recited this sentence:

“Here’swhatIwantsoychailatteanddon’t’fillittoofull.Venti.

To which the barista said, “Um, so that’s a Venti Soy Chai, not to full?”

“Yes, that’s what I said.” annoyed.

I was too afraid to add a please to that sentence.

Later in the week, the woman in front of me had just returned from a run, and had dragged her soggy self into Starbucks. While she was ordering her drink she was stretching out her hamstrings. She barely looked up to utter “Grande Latte.”

It astounds me the way people who work in service jobs are treated. It’s not just at Starbucks, conversations like this happen at the grocery store, the wine store, the gas station. We encounter so many people during the course of our day, yet we tend to just look past these people, as though they are simply a means to an end.

But the people who are waiting on us are more than that. They are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers or sisters. They fall in love and share jokes. They worry about their bills being paid, their kids growing up, and the oil spill in the Gulf. In other words, they have story. They are humans and deserve to be treated as such.

I know that all the people I saw at Starbucks were in the rush of the ages, needing to get somewhere, needing to get going, barely having the time to order a coffee. I know that’s how they were feeling because that’s how I was feeling, too.

But it doesn’t take that long to say. “How are you today?” or, "Will you get out to enjoy the sun today?” You don’t need to ask them their life story, or to join you for coffee, just simply look them in the eye and say “No thank you, I’m all set” when they ask if you’d like a receipt.

I am certainly not Mother Theresa for taking the time to do this. But I know that when I do, there is something valuable that gets shared. It’s a connection that let’s the other person know that they have been seen as someone more than just a person in a uniform. They have been as a human being.