This is Starbucks Dude

Okay, I admit it, I call Starbucks “my other office”, and I sit here with my iPad or MacBook Pro and check my email and read and write. In fact, right now, everybody who has a seat here has some device in front of them. Most of us tolerate a colleague taking the occasional phone call, within reason, and we get annoyed with people who are loud and long on their calls. We might even put up with a YouTube video, if it’s short, and funny, and the guy keeps the volume down—but if someone starts watching BBC or CNN battle scenes from anywhere, I’m going to ask them to use their headphones, or turn it WAY down.

Some things are just not acceptable. Starbucks is a place of diversity and tolerance, and frankly, with all the banging of dishes and water running and coffee grinding and steam streaming, it is a place of noise. Noise and tolerance. Once in a rare while someone pushes this concept a bit, like the guy with the “card table laptop” in one of my other posts, but usually, usually, nobody really goes over the top. Until today.

There’s a guy with a BIG Dell laptop, attached to an external monitor – and no, I don’t mean one of those super portable USB connected external flat panels. Visualize this on a little round wooden Starbucks table. I’m talkin’ about a DELL desktop monitor with a stand. 20″ diagonal. How did he even get it in here?! He’s eating up TWO power outlets at once. Oh, did I forget to mention the EXTERNAL keyboard AND mouse?? Is it Bluetooth? I didn’t notice. What’s next? A laser printer??

This is a Starbucks dude. Starbucks!!

Edited with BlogPad Pro

Size Matters

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"This guy has a card table on his lap."

This guy at Starbucks has the biggest laptop I’ve ever seen. He pulls it out of his backpack. The backpack looks like one of those traveling crashpads that rock climbers use. Have you seen those? It’s hilarious to see those guys hiking up a trail with what looks like a folded up single mattress with straps on their back. Anyway, he pulls this thing out, and he has to hold both arms over his head to get it out of the bag. When he puts it on his lap, I think he is going to unfold legs from the bottom of it. But no. It’s a Lenovo. It makes a 17″ MacBook Pro look like an iPad mini. He opens the lid and I think he might need a pry bar. It’s like watching someone open a big sarcophagas. But finally he gets it open and sits there staring at it. I think he’s typing stuff, but all I can see is the top of his head. The rest of him is completely hidden behind the card table.

I’d tell you about the huge guy in the corner with the tiny MacBook Air, but I gotta go.