Bite Me, Bluetooth Bully!

Hey, buddy! Yeah, you with the laptop and the cell phone and the headset. I hate to break it to you, but you don’t actually own that table at Starbucks.

Lately I’ve noticed (and a story in this morning’s Chronicle confirms) that people are using coffee shops as their office. These urban squatters move in, buy a single cup of coffee and proceed to occupy a chair for hours while they conduct business.

Shop owners are obviously concerned. Customers, the ones that actually buy stuff for cash, are squeezed out by these guys.

Here’s what happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I had arranged to meet a friend at a Starbucks in Burlingame, the one near the train station. I arrived a bit early, ordered a large Earl Grey (“Do you mean a grande?”) and scoped out seating possibilities. There was a Mom that looked like she was packing up the stroller, but she was just getting out a snack for her toddler.

By the window there was a guy in an upholstered chair with an empty seat beside him, but there was a good reason no one was sitting there, if you know what I mean. The fumes coming off of the guy were actually visible – he had little wavy lines surrounding him.

I settled in with my “Grande Earl, two bags” on a stool at a high table. My table companion churlishly gathered up his scattered papers and moved his laptop an inch to the left. He gave me a dirty look while trying to impress the person on the other end of his conversation with a monologue about market share, webinars, and sales projections.

I smiled in his direction while unabashedly claiming a piece of the 4-person table that Mr. Powerpoint believed was his and his alone.

When my friend arrived with a couple of shopping bags we took up a full half of the table. Mr. Bluetooth stiffened, harrumphed, and turned his back on us. Honestly, you’d think we had stormed uninvited into his private office to have our little tea party.

When we stated talking, he got up, abandoned his briefcase and laptop and stomped outside where he spent the next 30 minutes pacing and pontificating into his headset. We were glad to be spared his jargony jibba jabba, but had the uneasy feeling that we were supposed to guard his computer. I was tempted to send him an e-mail from his own account.

I asked another friend, who is currently a barista-in-training, about this new squatting phenomenon.

“We definitely have our regulars,” she said. “One guy comes in every day at 8:00 and stays until 11:00. It’s usually not too bad, but one day he had a conference with flip charts and everything. It was pretty annoying.”

Annoying? Yes, indeed. But also unfair—unfair to the business trying to make a buck, unfair to the customers needing a place to sit and sip, and unfair to the rest of us who just don’t care to hear the details of your global marketing strategy.

Next time, please get your grade double-shot low-foam whatever to go, and set up your office in your car where it belongs.