Telecommuting: typology of 4 customers met at the local bar

I have been teleworking for a few months. Not just a little, but totally. This means that my office is no longer the editorial office of our Paris office, but a small part of my room, with a chair (which rolls, yes), a shelf and a wooden desk. I hung some posters there, took away all the clutter I had accumulated in the editorial office (my colleagues are very happy not to see my piles of books and toys anymore) and installed it in my new apartment, in the new city in where you now live, far from the turmoil of Paris. And even if I love this new environmentthat I feel good there and that most of the time it suits me, I also like to go out and sit at the bar downstairsa stone’s throw from my new home.

This place resembles all the slightly cozy cafes that can be found in all more or less large cities in France. Comfortable sofas, cute furniture, cappuccinos and even homemade cakes that get devoured too quickly. Everything is here. And the most important thing, and what fascinates me every day, are its customers. The faces change every day, but the behaviors are the same almost every time, and I wanted to give you a portrait of them. Maybe you’re one of those people, maybe you run one of those bars, maybe you’re like me, one of those who I love watching people sitting nearby and imagining what their lives are like. These portraits are drawn feminine, because, due to professional bias, I observe women more than men.

The one who is always in a hurry

She is often there as soon as the bar opens, but she has no intention of sitting down on one of the comfortable sofas with a slightly worn seat. For her every day is a latté to take away in your thermos and a vegan biscuit. He can’t stand the fact that the queue in front of her isn’t moving and taps frantically on the wallet in her hands. Don’t hesitate to sigh loudly if the person in front of you has the audacity not to immediately know what you want to order and dares to hesitate. But even if she is impatient, she always remains very kind and friendly to the person who serves her drinks. Maybe you have already done this job in a previous life, you know what it is, and you don’t want your impatience to affect the person in front of you.

For her, who we will call Sophie here, everything has to go quickly, she doesn’t have time. She accompanied her children to school (and one of them has evidently forgotten her coat since she carries it on her arm, attached to her handbag) and has 17 minutes door to door to find herself behind the desk, open it and put it in her mailbox , before making a lot of phone calls that will surely be very important, since, I already told you, he doesn’t have time to wait, he’s already late.

She’s one of those who can walk quickly in a pair of very high heels and I admire her so much for this, I who manage to stumble even wearing only sneakers lower than Darmanin’s IQ. I see her get into the double-parked car, throw her bag and the baby’s coat on the passenger seat and speed off, forgetting her latte on the roof of the car.

The one who comes here to chat

If I had to give her an approximate age, I would say she would be around 75 years old. Maybe even a little more, but I’ve never been good at giving people’s ages, so hey, it’s approximate. In my head I call her Marianne, because she has a head posture full of pride, a bit like that of a former prima ballerina, and a very frank look. It is this direct gaze that stares at me this morning, or rather stares at my stickers. to miss blocked on my computer.

He doesn’t hesitate to start a conversation, ask me what I do for work, how long, what I’m writing, what I’ve already written, why I do it, etc. His questions come out, but she’s not intrusive, just curious and it’s touching. She talks to me about feminism, about the demonstrations she took part in as a child, about the right to abortion and about her older cousin who had to do it clandestinely a few decades ago. She buys me a cookie and sits next to me, and I don’t dare tell her that I have an article to write and that I really don’t have time to chat.

Well too bad, it’s worth discussing, I will write my article later, when he gets tired of arguing with me about different educational methods for children and police violence. Yes, I have been since morning full speed.

The one who is there working all day

He has everything planned out: his computer, his tablet, his phone, and most importantly, what I systematically forget about: the chargers for all this electronic equipment. You are obviously not a beginner in teleworking, you can see that you have experience, Amélie. Yes, I call her Amélie, she suits her, I think. She has a look that I would like to imitate, but evidently I don’t have her talent for combining colors and materials. Her arms are tattooed, her ears are pierced, her computer is all decorated. She sits there all day, strumming it and using it trackpad with energy.

He does it often Google Meet with a lot of people, and I can easily tell if he has his camera on, just by looking if a slightly forced smile appears on his lips. She must be a freelance graphic designer or something, and I once heard her be perfectly diplomatic when she was dealing with a potential client who clearly didn’t understand the very concept of creating art.

We do this often eye contact during the day, full of sisterhood, of those who want to say “yeah, you know, work sometimes feels good“. I like Amélie, I even think that if I wasn’t so sociable and shy we could become friends, but what do you want, I already have difficulty connecting with people I know, so perfect unknowns are not for now, you will Agree.

The one waiting for someone

I don’t know who is waiting, but he has been waiting for a long time. Or maybe she was way ahead of schedule for the meeting and time gets longer and longer, making the minutes that bring her closer to the person she’s waiting for even longer, testing her patience.

She tries not to act like “the one who waits” while scrolling on her phone, but I see her glance towards the door, consistently as soon as it opens. Her gaze darkens as she sees that this isn’t what she was supposed to reach for, and she returns to the phone, her back rounded, sunk a little deeper into one of the large blue velvet armchairs. I decide to call her Myriam, because it is a name that suits her, and I am almost disappointed for and with her, in seeing that the one who is waiting is not yet the one… or the one who has just walked through that door. . How frustrating.

Obviously I try to imagine: is she waiting for her boyfriend? Her girlfriend? A future date? One or a friend? A work colleague? Is it for a somewhat informal job interview? Is it someone from your family? If it turns out, it is her father whom she hasn’t seen for years, the one who left her mother overnight and who left them both alone. Maybe she decided to give him a second chance after all these years and she agreed to go have coffee with him, to listen to what he has to say. Frankly, her father better not be late. He had already behaved like an idiot by abandoning them when she wasn’t even 10 years old, he would have been better off managing this meeting, don’t you think? The door opens, and Myriam’s eyes shine: he isn’t her father, but it seems like it’s even better than that.

Come on, next time I’ll paint a portrait of the one who pretends to work and spends the afternoon watching movies. Coils on Instagram by activating his trackpad from time to time so that their computer doesn’t go to sleep, of those who order two coffees every day but don’t drink them, and of those who laugh so loudly that we wonder if they haven’t made a mistake somewhere.