Back to the Future

Thursday 1st May 2008
Usual start to the day with business ticking over, in the afternoon the rep from Lavazza Coffee came to give us all a training course on how to serve great coffee.
Before we left Clarkson we had arranged with the rep for him to come down to the Café and give us a training course in return for us selling his product, Lavazza is a much smoother coffee than the one they have been using and it is an International brand so we are confident it will go down well. He brought with him some screens to enclose the outside (patio) area which we put in the main concourse of the centre opposite Coles supermarket, to define our area and highlight the existence of the Café. He also brought us all the coffee and branded cups that we will need for the next couple of weeks as well as crib sheets to complement the training.
During the training we decided to give away coffee and put out boards stating that during staff training free coffee would be served, unfortunately the rep told us to put out the boards a little bit before the staff were ready to start serving and within minutes we had orders pouring in so we had to bring the boards back in for a while so that he could finish the training. Once the training was finished we served the backlog of coffee orders and then put the boards out again while Carolyn went round the other shops in the centre offering them free coffee which proved quite popular.
Thursday night is late shopping night so we were open until 8pm which was a bit of a lonely experience really, but bearing in mind the locals were used to the Café closing at 2pm we couldn’t really expect them to come flocking in on our first late night.
Ian plugged in his DAB radio tonight and is not happy, when he tried to set the sleep button at bedtime it showed 15 minutes before it would turn itself off but because the radio clock works on a pulse transmitted by DAB it does not know how to calculate a minute and 2 hours later when Ian woke up to find the radio was still on, he had to turn it off manually much to his annoyance. It is a little bit like back to the future over here, the technology that is out there and in use in the rest of the world just has not reached here yet, on the bright side when it does reach here we will already have the equipment and the know-how to use it.