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Coffeehouse Culture II: The Coffeehouse as Office

by Sandy Ikeda
Sat, 26 Jan 2008 at 12:47 AM

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It's no secret that people don't always go to a coffeehouse for conversation or for coffee. In my favorite neighborhood hangout, for example, the coffee quality ranges from okay to burnt tire rubber. Like me, where I started writing this entry, people often use coffeehouses as an "office." (I couldn't do this in my overall favorite NY coffeehouse, Caffe Dante in the Village, because computers are banned there — thank goodness!)

Coffeehouses have always been filled with solitary figures who quietly read, write, or, more and more these days, stare into computer screens. Why do they choose to work, assuming they really are working, in a public place, when most of them could very easily do so at home?

To socialize? In my experience they rarely if ever speak to others or even (appear to) look at them, but keep their noses buried and fingers tapping, hour after hour.

And it's noisy in here, especially at noon and 3 p.m., when school kids storm in for lunch or an after-school snack. So why come to a noisy public place but at the same time keep to yourself? Even with bad coffee this place is usually full. True, the coffee guys — I won't call them "barristos" — are friendly and personable, but at the Starbucks across the street — originators of burnt-rubber coffee — it's also very full, and they act like robots.

Because our apartments are so small? Yes, sometimes, but we wouldn't leave our little dwellings if public life were either too dull or too distracting.

A great city is full of people, mostly strangers, who have learned how to live close together. If you live in less-populated areas you abide by one set of social rules; if you live in cities like New York, you follow a somewhat different set. For example, one of the most important rules, from the standpoint of using the coffeehouse as office, is knowing how to leave other people alone without offending them. It's harder to do this in smaller towns because the chances of running into people you know is higher, and then it's harder to ignore them.

Not so in a big city. Here, we learn to ignore others without offending them, or to be ignored without being offended (and we learn that others have learned this), so that when we run into acquaintances, after a brief greeting it's completely okay to go back to your own business. (That might be a problem if it's a close friend, but in a big city the chances of such an encounter are lower.) You don't have to invite them to join you or ask to be invited and then sit and chat, which would be so distracting that you'd be better off working staying home.

The bottom line is that I think people come here to work for the same reason I do: I'm more productive. I read more, write more, and just get more things done in a given amount of time than at home. Some exceptions are when I'm working on something heavy and need to have a lot of books and articles lying around, which this place can't really accommodate.

And that brings us to the role of distractions. Anyone who has tried to work at home knows there are plenty of distractions there, in particular the big four: the TV, the bathroom, the refrigerator, and the Internet. When we become tired and need a break, it's easy, too easy, to wander or switch over to one of these things and lose yourself for "a few minutes" that can quietly stretch to a half-hour or more — "As long as I'm up, why don't I make a cup of tea?" — and pretty soon you're asleep on the sofa.

Coffeehouses, of course, have food and drink and restrooms, and more and more are going wireless. So what's the difference?

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