Fed up with drinking coffee in other people’s offices.

[canyouseemyhousefromhere]

That’s what it feels like lately. I popped in for a coffee in a local coffee shop and was surrounded by four separate people working with laptops, headphones and piles of paperwork talking loudly to ‘clients’ . No food or drink in sight. I have just heard one of them invite 2 people to a meeting in this cafe, he’s busy arranging chairs (carrying them across the cafe) as I type.
I have no particular problem to people working in coffee shops but some are really taking the p now.
They often take the best tables and are now frequently causing a nuisance. I have seen two groups of shoppers change their minds whilst in the queue not sure if it’s because of the office people or just coincidence.
Is there also a confidentiality issue here perhaps? A list with personal information was clearly in view on the table.
Does anyone else feel fed up with this or am I just being a misery? 🤷‍♀️

My partner and I were in Nottingham last year and went into a large cafe and virtually every table was taken by a person with a laptop, most just had a drink (which could for all I know be just the only one they had). We were very annoyed - surely the cafes are losing customers and should only allow laptops to be used for the duration of eating a meal eg 30-40mins?

I actually think it’s rather lovely that he brought a dog blanket and bowl - was the dog being annoying?

Fed up with drinking coffee in other people’s offices.
I read offices as orifices twice. I must start wearing my new reading glasses.

Surely this is a matter for the coffee shop and the people working? If they are not buying food and drink, the shop is quite capable of booting them out. And if the people working are discussing something confidential it certainly wouldn’t be the first time a public mobile phone conversation is overheard by somebody it shouldn’t have been. Hardly needs your input.

Worse was someone who’d parked up with his dog, complete with dog blanket and dog bowl.

I can't wrap my head around his thought process. Starbucks is not your front room! There should be some kind of line, unless it's a service dog.

It's up to the cafe owner, not you.

If they're annoying, welcome to the outside world where often, people are annoying. Any given group of people in a cafe can be annoying: parents letting their kids run riot, teenagers talking loudly, two people who seem OK at first before you overhear their objectionable views.

If you don't like the vibe of a place you're free not to give them your custom, it doesn't require a hissy fit. Are you just mad because - see my first point - given that it's up to the cafe owner and not you, the presence of all these laptoppers indicates that they're more valuable to the cafe than you?

And please, the performative concern about their confidential documents is even less your business. That's between them and their employer.

Also, many documents that look Serious might not even be confidential at all.

How does she know?

More generally, one major psychological effect of lockdown is that some people have lost the ability to put up with the low level of irritation that can arise from being in public with others. You know the sort of thing: people on phones, chatting with each other, working. It's an important part of socialisation, but it's a learned skill, not innate. It's very possible to lose it after months or years of social isolation.

To be clear, I didn't invent this theory, I read an article in The Economist about it. Some paper produced by some Ivy League uni argued for this.

It's a skill that we all have to relearn, because the alternative is an increasing withdrawal from public spaces, which in itself is a bad thing. Humans are social animals.

It might also help OP to bear in mind that having access to large, bustling cafes is a social privilege. Go to the South Wales valley where I grew up and ALL the cafes on the high street are closed. Empty, depressed. Places like these are crying out for a busy cafe with young people in gainful employment.

I completely agree. Our local Pret is constantly full of workers using laptops. One person will sit at a table for four and spread out all their paperwork and sit for hours with one drink. I did email to complain after I went with my mum and we couldn’t get a table after buying lunch there. They didn’t even respond.

Oh god you'd hate me!

I work 1-2 mornings a week in a café 9.30-12 and I take my small dog!

however I :

• have the kind of job where I don't have any conference calls. If I do, they're in the afternoons.
• I order a coffee every 40 mins or so... I basically chain drink flat whites the way people used to chain smoke
• if the cakes look good I'm definitely ordering one to eat now and one to go . Unless there's avocado on any kind of sourdough then I'm definitely getting that. (And probably a cake to take away anyway)
• I don't plug in. My laptop battery is sufficient for the "work stint" and I make sure I'm in a full charge the night before.
• Dog is used to the drill and sleeps on her tea towel sized mat until we leave (and I spend my lunch hour doing walkies somewhere new and exciting for her on the way home)

I concentrate spectacularly well in cafés for some reason. I get some of my best work done there, especially presentation writing.

At the weekend I do similar "work" except with my personal journal not laptop. I rock up dog in tow, sit alone and fill out my little journal with brunch and then take the dog on an adventure walk somewhere different.

You sound very considerate only! Like anything else, there's doesn't have to be an issue as long as people are being considerate and not taking the piss. I was out with my mum and DC for lunch a couple of weeks ago and had to leave the cafe we had been planning to go to as all the tables big enough to accommodate us were taken up by people working. Cost the cafe owners probably £50-60 by the time we would have ordered food and drinks for 4 of us, and we probably now won't bother going there again.

I guess only the owners know whether they're better off by allowing people to just sit there all day, but it would be fairly easy to compromise. Workers only between say 9-11.30 and 2-closing? Or make it clear that if a larger party comes in, they may be asked to vacate or move to a smaller table?

You do realise people can connect to VPNs whilst in mobile locations. That'd partly the reason the software is installed and is a requirement for use.

Does it though? Sitting there for several hours with just a coffee. I went in a small one recently with my husband and we were chatting and someone on their laptop kept glaring over at us because they were trying to work.

I cannot believe you went to all that trouble to email a gigantic international corporation about someone working in one of their generic coffee shops. What did you think they would do? Did you think they would care?!

@gannett it wasn’t much trouble- took a few mins on the app! No big deal but in life I find if you are disappointed in a service then it’s ok to let people know! They are actually losing money as pp have said - one person drinking a cup of coffee and sitting there for hours versus a family/group of friends spending £50+ on sandwiches, salads etc. just common sense.

@Harassedmum123 @gannett

I think sometimes Pret do care. At the Pret in Newcastle, which had two universities and full of students on laptops, they’ve put an hour maximum on tables. It’s a good idea and they do have some flexibility when it’s not busy but it stops people having a table for hours on end.

@DurhamDurhamthat’s a really good idea and I’m glad that they are enforcing it in some places. It’s a shame to let certain selfish individuals spoil it for everyone else.

You realise they are providing a service for workers on laptops as well?

I am sure they've factored in the relative profits of a one-off family visit vs. making their space useful to many regular laptop workers, but either way, Pret's profit margins are not something I'm bothered about and I'm not sure why you are.

@gannettit seems I’ve struck a nerve with you. I couldn’t care less about their profit margins. I would just like somewhere to sit once I’ve bought a reasonably expensive lunch. Not sure why you are finding that quite so hard to understand.

And that laptop worker would like somewhere to work. And the nature of coffee shops is that sometimes there aren't seats available. If you'd got to the table first and he didn't have room for his laptop, he wouldn't have been reasonable to complain about it either.

@gannett obviously you don’t think it at all selfish for a worker on a laptop to sit alone at a table for 4 during peak lunch hours with just an empty coffee cup on the table. Let’s agree to disagree.

Annoys me too. Went into a local independent with a friend, bought drinks and sat down, guy on next table asked if we would be quiet because he was “in a meeting.” I went over to the staff (no other customers at the time) and complained that he asked us not to talk … they did tell him he couldn’t ask people this but damage was down, we asked to have drinks put into takeout cups. I work 200m away and was treating my friend who volunteers with us as a change to discuss the forthcoming event, back to my office in the future and £12 less (or more as next meeting had 4 people) for the coffee shop. Yes I was using it to meet up but in person and I didn’t expect quiet

Why are you being so obtuse?

The objection is a leisure space being turned into a work space. When I’m in a cafe I’m not at work. I’m relaxing. But it’s pretty hard to relax when all you can hear is someone’s loud work conversation.

But these people are generally inconsiderate. I was in the half empty cafe in Foyles the other day, which is pretty big, and like those people at the cinema, two blokes with laptops came and parked themselves directly behind me, despite there being plenty of empty tables (that would have been more private as well). Absolutely no sense of their surroundings. They literally think they’re the centre of the universe.

See I think that depends on how you define a coffee shop. You say a leisure space. Me, I say it's a commercial public space. There is no legislation nor any unwritten rules as to the subject matter about which people are allowed to converse in coffee shops (as far as I know). Therefore I don't think you can say that it's a space confined only to conversational topics about leisure. But even if we did say that, I think it would be very hard to police - at what point does a conversation about life in general become a conversation about work, and therefore forbidden? Is the line so firmly drawn as that?

Nor are there generally rules as to what one can bring into a coffee shop, or where people are permitted to sit. These things are up to the preference of the individual customer and the discretion of the proprietor.

Lloyd's of London, the London Stock Exchange, and Instagram are all prominent examples of businesses founded in coffee shops. It would have been a shame if the founders of these businesses had been forbidden from speaking to each other whilst they were in the coffee shop environment.

On the artistic side, Hemingway, de Beauvoir, Sartre and Gladwell all discussed and mapped out book ideas with their friends in cafes. JK Rowling drafted much of the first Harry Potter in a coffee shop. I think it would have been quite sad if she had been forbidden from bringing in her laptop, or kicked out because she sat at a table which another customer would have preferred she did not sit at.

I like cafes where they have a specific area for laptops. The other places I avoid - mainly because the people on laptops give evils when you make normal conversation.