My friends and family may describe me as a “satire writer,” but this time, I’m being completely serious: what the fuck is a coffee chat? Seriously, what is it? In my attempt to find out exactly what a coffee chat is, I decided to become a REAL reporter. I had the pleasure of attending one hundred coffee chats on campus this semester, after which I received no job or club offers. The details of my work are as follows.
First, the reason for my research: There’s a wonderful thing in Balkan countries called “coffee culture”– after a day of work or school, you and a few friends go to sit in a cafe, drinking coffee and talking about your lives, sometimes for up to six hours. But we live in America, the land of the free and lethally overworked, where the lame cringe “community building” tradition of coffee has been turned into an awesome corporate shitshow to honor our sigma capitalist forefathers. This inspired me to truly investigate how and why coffee chats are operated.
A typical coffee chat was a carefully rehearsed ordeal. I met with another person that was responsible for determining my fate in a job or club at exactly 9:20 AM. They bought me an iced matcha latte. I proceeded to try to impress them subtly over the course of 15 precise minutes. This included: drinking the matcha at the right time, asking all the right questions like “Why the fuck did you choose this job if not out of desperation?”, and talking about my goals in life passionately, but modestly. Most importantly, it included trying not to shit my pants because the $6.50 small matcha had gone down the wrong way.
But wait, there’s more! I also had the pleasure of attending virtual coffee chats, in which the other person magically teleported my coffee to me through the screen and set the number one Google Images search for “woke coffeehouse” as their Zoom background. And quite possibly the best iteration I encountered during my research: asking my friend to have a coffee chat with me. Not lunch, not dinner, not even just “coffee,” but a 15-minute interpersonal conversation carefully inserted into my Notion agenda – because nothing says “quality time” like checking off a task list. Once I stopped seeing other people as human beings to relate to and bond with, I mastered the art of being in corporate America.
Others, including myself before this journey, might say, “oh, I don’t want to ‘network,’ I just want the pleasure of your company. Why can’t we just engage with each other and have actual conversations?” But after my journey into the pits of hell very cool and totally normal world of coffee chats, refreshing my Gmail and waiting for someone to “be in touch” like they said they would, I’ve realized that this opinion I used to have is a deep personal flaw of mine. I’ll be sure to fix it by my next coffee chat with the social impact consulting club – I’ve got a good feeling about this one, you guys!!