Customer service tip: chat, but not TOO much. That’s especially applicable to me, because I’m baking goodies for the enjoyment of all café patrons, and I can’t be loitering around stuck in a conversation while my vol-au-vents are going from crispy and delicious to charred rubbish. It’s a waiting game, but also one of timing.
I’m mostly reiterating this to myself, because I had a bit of a disaster yesterday. I understand that Johnny’s is the kind of environment where everyone feels at home, and that’s really lovely, but it does make people chatty and when someone doesn’t leave you any breaks to slip away…well, disaster. We had a lady in this morning who does official inspections of Melbourne pool fencing to make sure it’s up to standard, all the children are safe, etc. I don’t know if she’s terribly lonely or just the type who loves to talk about her work, but I got my ear talked off for a good twenty minutes on how she visited a home that morning and they’d painted all over the fence so you couldn’t see inside. I could really see her point, though; that’s just not on. These folks had children as well, so…well, all pool fencing is made to see THROUGH. No point if you’re blocking the view.
So that happened. Half of my brain was in the kitchen, thinking about the gingerbread family that should’ve been brown and crispy, but I just couldn’t escape. There’s so much to learn about pool fencing, clearly! Anyway, I lost track of time, finally managed to excuse myself and returned to find smoke leaking from the oven. My gingerbread family came out looking like they’d been in a horrible house fire, and nobody had any gingerbread that day. Oh, I just HATE messing up a bake! I learned plenty about Melbourne’s glass pool fencing industry, to be sure, but in the end I’d rather have some well-baked gingerbread men. That’s my job, after all.
-Olga
Don’t tell the wife, but I’m mostly here to watch sport. Yeah, people usually go to the pub for that, but if I come home smelling of alcohol than Bessie will have my hide. She absolutely hates it when I’m out drinking with the mates, even if I don’t do any drinking myself! Johnny’s has all the TV channels, there are a few tables free that face the screen and so he knows now that I’m there for one thing only. It’s shameful, I know. I keep having to tell Bessie that I’m meeting with clients, which isn’t even a real thing I do in my job.
This is where I come to recover. This café is my only sanctuary, or rather…it feels that way sometimes. Not that I hate my job or anything, but I DO need places to recharge. Children, seriously. Children are wonderful gifts who bring so much joy, and so, SO very much exhaustion. In some ways I think I have it even harder than parents, because I’m the one they call on when they want their kids to be entertained. Throw in the fact that apparently clowns are a dying breed and you have the perfect storm of feeling underappreciated and stressed out, every day.
I really like Johnny, don’t get me wrong, but his family is weird. Every time I come to the café, it’s like I’ve walked into a wacky sitcom where some foreign people who don’t understand Aussie culture try to run a business, and it ends in hilarious, episodic disaster every time. Johnny is the lovable everyman who gets along with everyone and has to defuse the situation, the cook is the matron who turns into a tyrant when people don’t do things her way, the shop assistant is the snarky, socially-active drama queen and…well, Johnny’s dad just keeps trying to chop down the trees out the front. He used to work for a 
At some point I realised that I wasn’t going to make any friends just by sitting at home and wishing that I had some. I don’t get out all that much any more, not since Martha passed on, but it finally got too much the other day. I’m still hale and hearty, I still go for hikes every weekend, so I can’t just let myself fade away socially! Good thing Johnny’s Café opened recently, otherwise I probably would’ve had to drive a good twenty minutes or so just to find the nearest decent coffee joint. It would’ve been that, or trying to chat up that lady in the wool shop every day. She 