A Practical and Emotional Account of the Working-From-Home Exile and the Four Pounds Fifty That Makes It Possible
My working life is conducted across four coffee shops, a kitchen table that I try not to use because the kitchen table is in the flat where I also sleep and the boundaries between sleeping and working are already porous enough without the table becoming complicit, and occasionally a corner of the library on the Holloway Road where the wifi is free but the chairs achieve a discomfort that the library’s designers clearly intended to be motivating and that I find instead merely discouraging. The four coffee shops are the core. I rotate them according to a logic that I have never fully articulated to anyone but that operates roughly as follows: the one near the station on weekday mornings when I need to feel like I have gone somewhere to work; the one with the better wifi and more sockets on days when the work requires sustained connectivity; the one with the better coffee on days when the coffee is more important than the wifi; and the one closest to my flat on days when the distance to anywhere feels like too much and proximity is the only variable I can manage.
The total weekly spend on this arrangement, calculated honestly and including the occasional slice of cake that I consider a social obligation to the establishments whose floor space I am occupying: approximately thirty-two pounds. This is less than the cheapest co-working desk in a Hackney co-working space and more than working from the flat would cost in anything but the coffee itself. The calculation is not primarily economic. The calculation is about whether I am able to work, and the answer to that question is consistently better in a coffee shop than in a flat that contains, within visual range of my computer, approximately forty things I could be doing instead of working.
The Taxonomy of Tolerance
Not all coffee shops are equal in the tolerance they extend to the working exile, and identifying the tolerant ones requires a combination of observation and occasional social miscalculation. The tolerant coffee shop has sufficient sockets, wifi that is offered rather than hidden, and staff who do not begin looking meaningfully at the empty cup after forty-five minutes. The intolerant coffee shop has exactly one socket behind the counter, wifi that requires asking for and produces the conversational dance of being told the password and then not being able to read their handwriting, and a lunch service that converts the four-top I am occupying into a liability around noon. I have sat in both kinds many times. I have learned to identify the kind within about five minutes of entry by reading the density of laptops already present, which functions as a reliable prior indicator. Time Out reviews coffee shops for their coffee quality. What I review them for is the quality of their tolerance, which is a different and equally important category.
The Community
I know the freelance illustrator by sight. The illustrator arrives between ten and eleven, works until approximately one, and leaves with the air of someone who has done the thing they came to do. I know the writer, similarly: one hour, the hard bit, out. I know the person whose profession I have not been able to determine from two months of adjacent sitting, who arrives when I arrive and is there when I leave and who I have decided is simply very good at the coffee shop working life in a way that I aspire to. We have never spoken. We acknowledge each other. We constitute, with the other regulars whose faces I know and whose names I do not, a small community of the productive displaced who have found a temporary solution to the structural problem of needing to work somewhere that is not home and not being able to afford the official version of that somewhere. The community is good. The coffee is good. The four pounds fifty is infrastructure spending, and it is worth it.
What the Owner Said
The owner of my primary coffee shop told me last Tuesday that I am part of the furniture. This was said with warmth and in the context of a busy mid-morning when the compliment served also as a gentle indication that the four-top might be needed around noon, and I received it in exactly that spirit: pleased, aware of its dual function, and resolved to buy the cake proactively before the lunch question arose. The furniture comment is, I have concluded, the highest available compliment in the working-exile coffee shop ecosystem: it means you have been consistent enough, undemanding enough, and sufficiently pleasant in your background presence to have graduated from customer to feature. I aim to hold the designation. It requires only the continuing payment of four pounds fifty and the occasional cake, which is a sustainable subscription for the amount of professional output it enables.
The economics of the coffee shop working life also have a community dimension that the purely financial accounting does not capture. The barista who knows my order and starts making it when I walk in is providing a service that is worth more than the coffee it accompanies, because the service is recognition and recognition is, in a city of nine million people where anonymity is the default and the tube is silent and the streets are full of strangers, not a trivial thing. The cafe has made me a regular. The regular has made the cafe slightly mine. This exchange of recognition for custom is the informal economy of the urban coffee shop, and it is one of the reasons that the four pounds fifty functions as infrastructure spending rather than optional indulgence: it is buying into a social fabric that the working-from-home era has otherwise thinned considerably.
More from NewsThump. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
