You used to have to put a little bit of effort into overhearing others’ confidential conversations. The real effort, now, is to keep strangers’ private discussions from being shouted in your ear.
I needed to get some writing done the other day and, away from the office, stopped at a Starbucks to get caffeinated while I scribbled. I had been at this particular coffee shop some time ago and found that it had since been renovated. Where once there was a row of small round tables, there was now a single long shared one. The dreaded “community table.”
I don’t like them.
For starters, I don’t like them because I like to have a little elbow room so that I don’t feel like I’m flying on Spirit Airlines. I also like to have some social space, some psychological breathing room, some privacy.
Ever since community tables started becoming commonplace about five or six years ago, not only at Starbucks but at other chains such as Pret a Manger, I’ve suspected that we’re not supposed to like them. That is, we’re not supposed to get too comfortable. Coffee joints and fast-casual restaurants need to move people along to make room for new customers. Small tables encourage everyone from vagrants to would-be Melvilles to settle in for the long haul. The community table, by making it physically obvious that the space is not your own, encourages you to drink your coffee and go.
Such is the modern “community.”
I doubt I’m in the minority disliking communal tables, what with their overtones of a penitentiary mess. My guess is they are on the way out, a trend that has already overstayed its welcome. But it will take another round of renovations and new restaurants to get rid of them. Which means we’re stuck with them for several years yet — and the strange behaviors they encourage.
I fired up my computer and barely had begun to write when a trio sat next to and across from me. It was a casually dressed couple in their 60s and a young man in a suit. It soon became clear that the couple was launching a business and the young man was their banker. And a loud young banker he was. One would think that sitting among strangers, people would modulate their conversations, speaking sotto voce to maintain a modicum of privacy, especially when those conversations are chock-full of confidential information. One would be wrong.
I tried not to listen, not out of politeness, but because I had work of my own to get done. But I couldn’t help it, what with the banker braying in my ear. And so at first, I just took in snippets of information. I picked up that the couple was opening courts for one or another racquet sport. If I had been paying any attention, I would know whether they were for tennis, racquetball, or squash. Soon, I was hearing their strategy for sweet-talking the local regulators whose approval would be necessary for the building permits. I heard the project’s price per square foot, the capitalization rate, the net operating income they expected. All this while trying not to listen. Had I been actively eavesdropping, I would now know everything I needed to know to open competing courts.
We’ve forgotten the virtue of discretion. Phones are, of course, to blame, at least in part. Where once telephonic conversations outside the home were contained in the privacy of the phone booth, now we’re regularly treated to half of a conversation out on the sidewalk or in the close quarters of an elevator.
And yet, if anything, phones should make us more circumspect, paranoid even. Every one of them is a recording device. Which means, if you’re at a community table where a banker is talking out of school, you don’t even have to listen carefully, let alone take notes. Just press record, and you too can get into the racquet sport racket.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
