There are a couple of weak points in my coffee shop etiquette. Worst is that I use power outlets for my laptop. I am hardly alone.
Lisa Waxman built her PhD thesis around a study of coffee shop usage. She noted that access to a power outlet was a major factor in the public's use of space in the cafes at the Borders chain.
Outlet usage is not a major topic of her work but she references a set of small pink signs installed in Borders that read:
"As a courtesy, we request that you take into
consideration that other café customers may need
café seating for brief periods of time. This is
especially important during periods of high volume.
Additionally, to avoid safety hazards, laptops may ONLY
be used next to available outlets.
Thank you, Borders Baristas.”
Sadly, Borders' high volume days are behind it. This sign jibes with my experience that outlet usage is a topic usually addressed only by exclusion. Also the acceptability of modern outlet usage is tied to the laptop.
I don't know when I started using power outlets in coffee shops but I'm sure it was for a laptop. I think my habit must have started in an airport.
Like most other refugee camps, airports never have enough power. The dominant etiquette is the etiquette of scarcity. Ingenuity is rewarded. Discreet hoarding is accepted in a way. The rules are deliberately uncelebrated.
Airports have always been strange places. Dulles Airport, near Washington, D.C., is a formal and imposing place. Why does it have the relatively plentiful outlets that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial seems to lack? The Memorial opened twenty years after the airport. Both are gems of American architecture. Dulles serves over five times as many visitors a year (about 15 million) as the Memorial but scale alone is not the likely reason.
I think the reason is carpeting. In the thirty years since it opened, the Memorial has never been properly shampooed and vacuumed. Dulles has been. I always guessed that airport outlets were provided mainly for this reason.
Those outlets were usually easy to find and are very rarely free any more. More exotic were the outlets for TDD in larger clusters of payphones. Though the phones themselves were line powered and armored, the TDD would often plug into a 110V outlet directly under the phone.
Please accept this as a long introduction to the following bent gadget. There is no polite way to justify it. The power outlets at my local cafe have been so ravaged by the needy horde that they lack the strength to retain any of Apple's standard chargers with their compact folding-blade plug. Fortunately, those plugs pop right off. Just as Tycho Brahe may have worn different noses for different occasions, I have fashioned a crooked proboscis for my gadgets to use in public.
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| a bent proboscis |
It works well though it probably contributes to the further deterioration of the outlet and Western society.
