No happiness allowed!
I’d like to begin with some background for my out-of-town readers: Mishka’s is a little cafe in downtown Davis. They have grown relatively popular; most customers buy some $2 drink and then camp out for days on end, using the cafe’s outlets to power their MacBooks and MacBookPros while they go on to Pitchfork, Gmail, and muxtape.
Anyways, the cafe’s owner decided to institue “the Rule” a few years back. This rule allocates around 15% of the cafe for traditional cafe activites, as the owner sees it: reading leisure books, newspapers, and socializing. Here’s my first issue: a ‘leisure book.’ To sugguest that a book assigned for a class cannot be enjoyable is problem enough. What’s more, the system for enforcing this seems weak: How is the clerk to know if I’m reading a certain book for a class or for pleasure? This issue is really only a smaller part of my overall problem.
A few weeks ago I went to Mishka’s, ready to study for my econ 162 midterm. I notice that all tables inside and outside are full; “no problem,” I think to myself. “I’ll just wait in the Rule area until a table opens up.” Forty five minutes later, and still no tables inside or outside. I would like to point out that I am the only one in the Rule zone. A clerk approaches and demands that I leave. I explain the situation, but my pathetic story inspires no mercy in her cold heart. Sorry, but there’s no real conclusion to this story. I went home, studied, and took the test the following day.
