[Chilla's Art] The Closing Shift | 閉店事件

Woke up in a glorified wardrobe pretending to be an apartment. Realised I was late to work, found someone's phone on the ground, then realised I'd bought one of those new high-tech cars that won't let you in unless you give a lost phone away. It was so dark I couldn't see anyone around and spent ages circling my apartment block until I accidentally bumped into some weirdo crouching in the shadows 'looking for something'. He took the phone off my hands, and my vehicle doors silently unlocked. I then went to work, my boss was an a**hole, and while I felt like I was making orders correctly, for some reason I couldn't bring myself to place them in front of the customer. I tried again and again, dumping a dozen full cups of coffee into the bin as I attempted to place them down on the counter for the customer. At one point I walked near the ice machine and the coffee in my hand simply disappeared, replaced by the ice scoop - I felt like I was losing my mind. Try as I might, I just could not place the coffee down and complete the order for this man who, despite mentioning how uncomfortable the shop made him numerous times, stood quietly and waited. Perhaps my subconscious brain knew that I just wasn't that good a barista. Perhaps I was working in one of those new high-tech coffee shops where all the blown-out, high-contrast lighting makes it impossible to see what steps I'm missing. In any case, I turned to the tutorials to figure out what I was doing wrong. Sadly, it turns out that the one piece of technology in my life that wasn't new and high-tech was the one I needed the most. As I placed the 'hot-drink VHS' tape into the player, I squinted, crouched, changed viewing angles to try and see past the reflections on the screen...but I simply couldn't understand a damn thing that was happening on the tiny, low-resolution CRT TV that comprised the only way to learn how to do my job. I suddenly realised why my manager was so touchy about staff making mistakes. None of us were trained, and he was too cheap to replace the TV with something of a higher resolution. Or too lazy to make a text document. Naturally I made the only sensible decision: I immediately quit, uninstalled the game, and applied for a refund. 10/10: a nightmarishly accurate recreation of service work.