Today I was (well, still am) at my favorite cafe in Berkeley. Cafe Milano. It's great. They play classical music, the workers are super friendly and greet me by name, they reset to internet when it's not working with my computer, they talk to me in Spanish because they know that I spent my summer in Costa Rica and that I'm trying to practice, their food & coffee are both delicious and reasonably priced, and if something costs $2.68 and you give them $3.00, they'll give you $0.50 back instead of weighing you down with change. They're great. Period.
But today I saw where the bad reviews come from. There were some women here, maybe 50-something, who spent a long time waiting at the "pick-up." When I saw they were holding money, I asked if they were waiting in line to order (they were), and I said, mentioned that they could order at the cashier's counter (I pointed). They reminded me of an older version of the wicked step sisters . . . I can understand their frustration, because they had been waiting a long time at the wrong counter, but that's not an excuse to be rude. So then they were rude to me in their response to my suggestion, and then rude to the guy working at the counter. They all ordered at once, all thrusting money at him at once. One of them speaking loudly, as if the cashier didn't speak English (he does) and speaking louder would somehow help the language barrier, one of them saying, "NO MUSTARD AT ALL!" (what's wrong with, "without mustard, please."?), another was mad that they were out of the kind of soup she wanted, and the other forgetting her change, so the cashier gave it to her friend, who got flustered with the responsibility fo $3.75 and somehow wasn't able to give her friend the $0.75 part, so her friend who the change belonged to came back asking for her seventy-five cents, to which the cashier said her friend had it, who was eventually able to find the $0.75 that she had forgotten to give to her friend. Confusing? I agree.
I was glad I was after them, so I could give the cashier a little encouragement and help to pick of the pieces in the wake of their storm.
I can't image those women would have written a good review about Milano. But I also don't think that their view of Milano through their bitter, demanding glasses is a fair one.
And for me that was really an eye-opening moment of how the lens through which we look at the world really does impact our perception of reality (duh). I'm not saying that bad things never happen to good people, because that's obviously not true. But I think that if you find that everything bad always happens to you, and everyone you meet is an incompetent idiot, and everywhere you go has something wrong with it, the problem may be with the glasses you're wearing (. . . or the glasses I'M wearing), and not with the world outside them.
