load-balancing

I popped into a coffee-house for a nice sit and a think on the way home today (on a whim and with great surprise that the flock of students in front of me hadn't assigned a sub-flock to nip in and loudly capture all the empty tables) and organised my tasks for my day off tomorrow, mostly revolving around finishing off processing wedding pictures for the in-laws so that they don't hassle me about it all weekend when we pop to visit them at the end of the week. Although this girl entered the shop just in front of me she wasn't in front of me in the queue so I assumed she'd spotted or was meeting someone she knew. However, after I'd ordered my drink and found a table there she was, sitting at a table without having bought anything but strangely not being chased out by the staff, though as there was only one of them on duty they probably didn't have any spare bandwidth to constantly observe all the tables. She stayed there without buying anything for at least twenty minutes after which she was joined by a bloke who didn't buy anything that I could see and who had nothing delivered to the table for the remaining five minutes I was there, though it is not beyond the bounds of possiblity that the single active serving-entity had so much to do that it would have taken her more than five minutes to get round to preparing something non-immediately-servable. There was another member of staff present but they appeared to have drawn the short straw (the one which ended in a short-bristled brush used for cleaning toilets) and were perhaps not in the mood to chase people who hadn't bought anything off the chairs and into the streets, even though a dripping bogbrush would be an ideal tool for such as task.

But then, why not allow them to stay there until the table is needed by a paying customer? Though I like quietness I would always choose a populated establishment over one which was completely empty except for the staff and I assume restaurant staff feel the same when they stick the first bookings of the evening in the seats by the windows. I start to feel guilty if I stay too long after the last undrinkable grainy dribbles of coffee in my mug have become tepid, never mind sitting down without anything whatsoever but I'm quite susceptible to risks of that sort of type. Perhaps this pair were just borrowing against the legitimate sitting-about-wiithout-an-active-purchase they would earn by eventually getting a coffee or a muffin. Shops do sometimes have signs up advising that the bogs are only for the use of money-spenders but I've never seen a sign in real life advising that the chairs and tables are only to be occupied by people who have bought stuff to consume upon and from them; the odd sign asking that people buy their food or get their order before seating themselves always seem to be requesting people to not effectively jump the queue by getting their seat first. Though things like shopping centres have indoor public spaces where people can sit and read/watch/think without having to pay to do so they're usually a bit busyish and there's an air of weird to anyone sitting in any one place too long. The ideal of the sort of thing I think it would be good if there were more places like it is the area under the dome in the Potterow student union, my second-favourite lurking-spot of times past. Though coffee and foodstuffs were available the big step things could be sat upon all day without beng either charged or chased away. There are plenty of public spaces like it open to the elements but they're not quite the same.