{"id":16859,"date":"2013-02-18T11:00:34","date_gmt":"2013-02-18T17:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcitement.com\/?p=16859"},"modified":"2013-02-17T21:10:19","modified_gmt":"2013-02-18T03:10:19","slug":"when-the-barista-makes-a-moccary-dont-lose-your-tamper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/entertainment\/when-the-barista-makes-a-moccary-dont-lose-your-tamper\/","title":{"rendered":"When The Barista Makes A Moccary (Don’t Lose Your Tamper)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cA leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.\u201d — Anais Nin<\/p>\n

There\u2019s been a little disturbance in the force of the coffee world lately, with the mastermind behind the website Bitter Barista<\/a><\/em>\u00a0Twitter-blog being unmasked as Matt Watson, a.k.a. nerd-rapper Spekulation<\/a>. Watson may not have the graceful words of Anais Nin on the subject of the dark brew, but this is somehow important to people.<\/p>\n

A previously anonymous writer, Matt Watson would post trite and vicious comments about his customers, his work situation, and his bosses at Georgetown\u2019s All City Coffee in Seattle, of all places. Watson described his comments as “satirical”, where many people would describe them as somewhat humorous or immature; certainly not the product of a nebbish gingery 30-something with a degree in philosophy who claims 90 percent of his content is purely fictional.<\/p>\n

\"What<\/a>

What did you put in my coffee? I cant feel my… You’re. That. Guy.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

A few examples of the kind of material that appears on Bitter Barrista.<\/p>\n

Please pour your coffee into the trash can so it can ruin my day later.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

So, a guy grumpily walks up to the counter and says ‘Soy mocha.’ I reply, ‘Hi, mocha. Soy Matt. What would you like to order?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

This guy just got mad because we don\u2019t have a yellow-pages. We also don\u2019t have an abacus or a sun-dial.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI really liked my job,\u201d Watson said. \u201cThat\u2019s what I realized over the last week. It\u2019s a shame you can\u2019t have a job you like, but also complain about.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the wake of the headlines the made by a St. Louis Applebee\u2019s waitress, who got fired for posting a receipt by a local Pastor who stiffed her co-worker on a tip and blamed God for her antics, this kind of thing is deemed newsworthy. Since CNN disbanded its investigative journalism department<\/a>, there are unemployed wanna-be hard-nosed journoes trawling the \u2018net for exhibitions of lower and lower common denominator stories.<\/p>\n

This story made the ledes at Gawker<\/em>, Good Morning America<\/em>, the Seattle Times,<\/em> and filtered it’s way to us here at Techcitement<\/em>. (See, a coffee pun. We take no prisoners here!)<\/p>\n

The story was originally leaked by Sprudge.com<\/em><\/a>. Don\u2019t worry, we\u2019ve never heard of it either, until now. Started in 2009 as a coffee-related clone of the shit-brewers at The Drudge Report<\/em>, Sprudge<\/em> is run out of the stanky depths of hipsterdom — Portland, Oregon — by Zachary Carlsen and Jordan Michelman.<\/p>\n

Being the purveyors of all that’s good and holy related to coffee, the second largest global crop after petroleum, Carlsen and Michelman saw the blog of the Bitter Barista<\/em> – started on January 30th, and decided it was not good. The owners of Sprudge <\/em>decided Watson’s style was no longer edgy, and instead, they deemed it unhip and played out. The snarky 30-something with a cooling degree and a sputtering career in nerd-rap, who stood there Twittering his brain-droppings instead of taking your order, was in\u00a0Sprudge<\/em>‘s sightlines \u201cdue to its unfortunate exploitation of the outdated snarky barista archetype\u201d and they ran their snarky, exploitative piece on February 7.<\/p>\n

This move is profoundly ironic, as Carlsen and Michelman appear to be the very image of the awful, hackneyed, outdated hipster d-bag cliche mocked by shows like Portlandia<\/em>, and by pretty much everyone, everywhere. Carlsen occasionally works at FourBarrel Coffee in San Francisco. Below is an example of the level of humor at Carlsen’s workplace (which isn\u2019t even the best coffee joint in San Francisco, so he clearly needs to up his game!)<\/p>\n

\"<\/a>

Fixie riders can only loiter in this alley between dusk and dawn. Vir gebruik deur, non-hipsters!<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The below video is\u00a0Carlsen and Michelman’s take on the heavily worked over 2010 “Shit Girls Say” meme to give you a feel for their style. Although, it\u2019s about a minute too long for it\u2019s 100-second length.<\/p>\n

[yframe url=’http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=exH-Jmdav6g’]<\/p>\n

The two also seem to think you turgid, two-legged cash-donors don\u2019t know how to drink coffee. Don\u2019t worry, the music is like, super obscure. You probably haven\u2019t heard of it.<\/p>\n

[yframe url=’http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=8FXE8CLncYQ’]<\/p>\n

Watson made little attempt to conceal his connection between his Spekulation persona and his authorship of The Bitter Barista, <\/em>and Tweeted thusly, but the blog owner’s identity is somehow deemed newsworthy. In an industry driven by so much exploitation of everyone involved in it\u2019s supply chain, it\u2019s only seeming that one more victim is added to the heap. Admittedly, Watson isn\u2019t being paid less than $3 a day for 100 pounds of prime roast, nor is he a 7-year old Guatemalan being forced to help his family, but he is being singled out for voicing his run of the mill workplace frustrations.<\/p>\n

According to Sprudge,<\/em> Watson needs to shut the hell up<\/a> and get that 100 pound bag loaded up on the truck before El Jefe comes by.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re in the service industry! Your job is to serve, honey. You need to tamp down all that shade grown.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI thought Sprudge would like my work, but I guess they didn\u2019t,\u201d said Watson. \u201cThey said only some satirical work is acceptable and they linked their own website.\u201d<\/p>\n

In case you haven\u2019t heard, thanks to Sprudge<\/em>, Matt Watson got shitcanned shortly after the story ran. Watson\u2019s former boss\u00a0told The Seattle Times<\/em><\/a>\u00a0that he couldn’t endorse the statements by Bitter Barista<\/em>, even if they were humorous, and that was why Watson was terminated. Sprudge<\/em> now receives death threats<\/a>, no doubt from people who take their coffee way too seriously, but they\u2019re probably more entertaining than Sprudge<\/em> itself.<\/p>\n

Sprudge<\/em> wants Watson, and everyone else, to understand what great pride it takes in what it does.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re lucky to know and work with many baristas, and we\u2019ll continue to advocate for them and their efforts in what we consider to be a special, valuable, vibrant, remarkable, and growing culture. You\u2019re in the service industry! Your job is to serve, honey.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You can help Matt Watson Kickstart his coffee-based coffee-table coffee book here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cA leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.\u201d — Anais Nin There\u2019s been a little disturbance in the force of the coffee world lately, with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":16865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[905,45,1920,46,908,1609],"tags":[3962,3964,3965,3961,3963,49],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16859"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16859"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16892,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16859\/revisions\/16892"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}