Who Will Serve My Latte?
From an email conversation with my friend, Laura Golden, about The Latte Manifesto a forthcoming book about culture or lack thereof in Silicon Valley
Or, what do I do about the problem of de-latte-ization in the affluent urban centers?
Hey, here’s an idea!! Let’s use gene therapy to make apes smarter and use them as domestic servants. Hmm, never mind, need opposable thumbs to serve coffee, probably would spill. They would revolt, wipe out humans, and take over the earth? What are you smoking, it would never happen.
We could get Mexican’s, they’d be cheaper. But then every damn politician that came along would threaten to deport them all for stealing good jobs away from Americans. Course by then, they’d be TECH jobs, because you’d need to be a PERL/JAVA/PHP/C++ programmer to operated the web-enabled 5 GHz Pentium 5(tm) espresso machine and to keep out the 31337 L337 hackers using Zombie IRC chat servers to Denial of Service attack Starbucks Inc.
We could use robots? Wouldn’t be cheaper or more efficient… probaby would spill more coffee and cost a lot more, but hell you could put it on the web and track it… little coffee cam, clip together the funniest spills and sell the tv rights. Or maybe you could order your drink remotely and then pick it up… cold. Hmm, too stupid? This is America, I don’t think so *G*.
What about 16 year old high school students? That used to work pretty well. People complained that they were rude and hadn’t a clue about how to serve coffee, but they at least did the job, and worked cheap? How about them? What, you say? Too busy anyway rolling in IPO money and they have coffee makers in their ferraris? Nevermind.
So where are we left? Well, I’m glad you asked that. You see the problem of de-latte-ization in the affluent urban centers is one that I have sworn to combat. I’ve been a strong proponate of education and school vouchers. It is only through education that we can make a difference.