The Laptop Nazi
Friday, May 13, 2005
Unreasonable is only the beginning of adjectives I could use to describe this man.
I consider myself a tolerant person...well, not really, but it sounded like a good line to start with. In any case, I met with an ODIOUS creature in the heat of gearing up for finals. It was the cherry to top off an already stressful day.
First of all, it was a Sunday--a day that should be devoted to taking it easy and leisure. BUT as it was the weekend before the first week when presentations were due, I was having meetings with group members and frantically scrambling to get work done. The most convenient place to meet was school, but we tried to maintain a “sunday-ish” sort of atmosphere by meeting at a cafe. Cafe Esperanto is wonderful for doing school work. The lax service is condusive to staying for a very long time with a lone cup of coffee and my laptop for many hours. They never push for you to get out because they *know* that they are a student cafe where many will come to study. It’s open 24 hours and the atmosphere is very chill.
For the second, i thought i’d mix it up a bit and try another cafe (how sad would it be to leave for 1 hour only to come back and have *another* meeting?). Courtney and I headed off to explore other unknown cafes. And therein lay our trouble. We wandered into Cafe Dante, which is also very near school. We orderd our coffees that weren’t exactly cheap, chatted a little, and then i pulled out my laptop. Not even a minute passed before a waitress made a bee-line to our table.
Her: “You can’t have a laptop in here.”
Us: “...?”
Her: “I said you can’t have a laptop in here.”
Us: “Why?”
Her: “It’s the owner’s policy.”
Me: “Does it say it anywhere?”
Her: “No, it’s the owner’s policy.”
Me: “Well, then can we have our coffees for free because we would NEVER have come here if we knew that there were no laptops allowed. You see, we’re meeting for a class project and we NEED the laptop.”
Her: “Let me get the owner.”
After about 10 minutes, she still had not returned. We had not put the laptop away. In fact, we defiantly continued to work away even though her directions seemed pretty clear. We figured at that point that she had just made a big show but wouldn’t really enforce it or bring the owner. BUT alas, the owner came out.
And i was feeling beligerent. (I suppose I’m really edgy now after the
haircut fiasco that happened back in September)
The owner made the same, “You can’t have your laptop here” statement. When we asked where his sign was, he blustered in his thick accent, “I DON’T NEED A SIGN! WHY DO YOU THINK YOU CAN BRING A LAPTOP IN HERE? This is a CAFE, NOT AN OFFICE! This is one of the oldest cafes in New York! You don’t bring your laptop in here to do work!” His disgust for the electronic device was evident. So I shot back with, “How were we supposed to know? By reading your mind?” “You ask ‘can i use a laptop here?’” We argued back, “That makes no sense! Why would we ask? It’s not a problem in ANY OTHER CAFE IN NEW YORK.”
I made our final offer. “Well, then give us our coffees for free because we wouldn’t be here unless we knew that we could use it.”
It must have been evident that I wasn’t going to budge. Or I wasn’t going to pay. In fact, i was ready to walk out without paying a cent. Seeing that kind of resolve, he decided to opt for keeping some kind of profit. “Ok, you stay this time. But don’t bring that in here ever again!” “Oh, don’t worry,” I replied. “We’re never coming here again!”
We stayed for another hour or so just to spite him, but by then i was so agitated that it was difficult to get any real work done. My question is, does he outlaw PDAs? Blackberries? Cellphones? Can you do that? Don’t get me wrong, i can understand that he wants to keep the atmosphere relaxed and cafe-ish, but if that’s the case, he’d better be willing to post notice or have a lot of disgruntled students giving bad PR. Like this. DON’T EVER GO TO CAFE DANTE ON MACDOUGAL AND BLEECKER. Ridiculous man. Grrrrrr.
That is so bizarre. I can’t really fathom it actually. Maybe he’s tired of people only buying a cheap drink and then staying at his cafe all day.
Of course, that’s exactly how this company works.
Posted by les on 05/20 at 07:53 PMHey Kat,
Next time bring a desktop…
and your own coffee…
and a whole bunch of friends.
By the way, you have no idea how frustrating it is to be a sarcastic person in a country where I can´t speak the language.
Posted by Alan on 05/23 at 09:27 AMyou did the right thing. i hate elitist’s.
Posted by Ryan Moore on 05/23 at 08:38 PMActually, I feel a little sorry for his poor, old-world self. He probably imagines that he’s located off a little cobblestone square in Tuscany, where people chat for hours about the grape harvest. He absolutely should not have yelled at you, but what can you do. You’ve got the culture gaps of age and country working against you. I’ll betchya anything he also doesn’t allow speaking on cell phones.
Re. Alan, are you in Colombia right now? intact?
Posted by on 06/02 at 10:17 AM