A couple weeks in George told me to hire a floor staff for weekends and a full time barista to replace Rhys when he left for Asia. I hired Avery for the floor position because she was from California and said in her cover letter that she needed a job, “because I really like the guy I'm seeing and if I can't find a job I'll have to leave the city. So if you give me a job you'll be helping true love!” Then I hired Tynique because I met her at my local Banh Mi (Vietnamese Baguette) shop and she'd heard of the rap group Odd Future. She said she'd made coffee for 6 months at the sandwich place and our coffee wasn't that great so I thought she'd pick it up quickly. I noticed from Day 2 that her voice was unbelievably loud.
It was brutal when I fired her. I made my mind up on a Thursday afternoon when this one family that came in every single day sent her coffees back twice and hinted that they were close to going elsewhere. I've honestly never been more embarrassed in my life, I couldn't look them in the eyes, it was horrible. I had to keep Tynique on for the rest of the weekend though or else I'd have had to stay there from open to close every day and I Just. Didn't. Want to. – ! I put shoutouts for new baristas on a few Facebook groups and started taking trials when she wasn't there. Like a spy. Or a coward. From the moment I decided in my head that I was going to have to fire her, I just didn't want to be around her. I'm sure I was a very shitty person in those three or four days, and I was also conscious of her attempts to buddy-up to me, sensing as she must have that something was wrong – I can feel myself becoming self-conscious as I discuss this. Do I seem arrogant? She definitely was being extra-nice to me, I'm sure she was trying to save her job. I recognized it because I've done it before, it made me pity her, which is awful. Being someone's boss has made me realise I'm very uncomfortable in positions of power. The central fallacy I can't seem to shake is that holding power over someone makes you better than them. “I don't feel like I'm better than these people I've hired, so why should I be their boss?” – but being someone's boss doesn't mean you're better than them, it just means you're their boss. Somehow that's hard for me to wrap my head around. I wish I could have told her straight away, but that would have been shooting myself in the foot – might have left then and there and I couldn't afford to let that happen. Either way she was going to be hurt: she'd had her Mum come in one day, and the lovely lady sat at the bar and ate lunch while chatting to us. She was a cake designer. On the Sunday I had Tynique close while I left just after lunch to go do a show. She said she needed to be gone by five, and I had one more barista to trial for her position, so I told Tynique to leave at five if she had to, and told the trial to meet me there at 5:30. When I arrived the girl I was trialling said something about running into Tynique when she got there. I'd been a little worried about exactly that – an awkward, sitcom-style crossing of paths – but I ignored it and went on with the trial. After half an hour the shop's landline phone rang, I answered and it was Tynique, she was angry. I walked outside and told her that we were going to have to let her go because her coffee wasn't good enough. She said she felt “really angry and disrespected”, before telling me she was going to go to Fair Work and file a complaint.
In June 2014, five weeks before I was due to fly away from Melbourne to move to London, I got a text from the new owners of Moth to a Flame where I'd been making coffee four days a week for the past few months. They told me business had been slow since they'd taken over and they couldn't afford to keep me on, so I was fired. I went in an hour later to pick up my last pay in an envelope and could barely hold back tears, I was moving overseas in five weeks, I'd been counting on that money coming in. They'd been paying me in cash and so in one last desperate, scrambling attempt to keep my job I threatened to go to fair work and tell them I'd not been paid any superannuation. The manager, Tito – who was a fucking legend – got angry: “You don't do it like this. I thought I could meet you here and we could shake hands, and you try to pull this shit!” Three years later Tynique was pulling the same “shit” on me. I didn't get angry though, I wish I could say I was that quick on the return, but I wasn't. If I remember correctly, I parried her away with an authoritative, “Dooon't... no don't do-o-on't do that!... noooooo.. whaatt?”
Turns out she had no claim. She was employed on a casual basis, and had been there three weeks – you can't claim unfair dismissal on that. I should have probably known that – seems like managerial information really, maybe Stu was right and I really was just a supervisor dressed up in a man costume. But I was also the best that Backstreet had, because as the old saying goes, if you pay peanuts, you get dumbcunts. And that's what I found when trialling people to replace Tynique. It wasn't so much an issue of the pay, which was fine, the issue was selling people on the idea of actually working in this place. I can't lie to someone and tell them it's all going fine when I'm taking multiple calls from people every day saying my boss owes them money – and I mean MONEY! The main selling point of the job to prospective staff was the gaping opportunities for slacking off, but people who are serious about making good coffee usually don't want a job with those kind of opportunities, they want somewhere challenging where they can learn and grow and be challenged in a fun but professional environment with strong, like-minded people focussed on a... BLEURGH. All of that crap – but not me, baby!
I ended up hiring a friend of one of the guys from the bottle shop around the corner who came in with her resume right when all seemed lost. Tynique sent Avery a message calling Backstreet a “hell hole”, and hoping she'd “make it out” – cartoonishly melodramatic, and laugh we did, but I understand the sentiment. She never gave her key back, and after a week of not responding to my messages asking for it, I snapped and called her “pathetic”. Not one of my great victories.
And so the beast limped onward.
Click here to read the next part - Stuart's Hand-Made Chopping Board
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