An in-depth study into the impact of social media on workplace productivity has revealed that when laptops get taken to on-trend cafés they often spend more time being photographed than actually being used. The findings of the study, conducted by a local university, revealed that when a person takes their laptop to a café, they will spend 67% of their time trying to best capture the portable computer sitting on the wooden table surrounded by photogenic breakfast food and delicious coffee. A further 24% of the time will be spent surfing the web for things unrelated to work, and just 9% of the time will be spent engaging in actual productive work.
Despite the obvious attraction of leveraging a flexible working arrangement with dining out in a nice café, it seems any such outing is catastrophic for productivity. A barista from an inner north café told The Watsonia Bugle that he was not surprised by the somewhat controversial findings. Dereck* said, “Haha, that doesn’t shock me in the slightest. The amount of times I’ve stood and watched some wanker rearrange their whole table setting just so they can get a ‘quick’ pic for Facey or Insta, it’s tragic. Half the time they’re more interested in the milk pattern that I put on the top of their coffee than they are for the actual taste. As I said, wankers. All of them.”
Dereck also revealed that an empathy he occasionally feels for the laptop brigade quickly dissapates when he reads another poorly formed barista joke online. He said, “As much as I want to feel sorry for them, I just can’t. Us baristas cop heaps of flack for supposedly being snobby, but at least we’re doing work. Our actual output is very very high when you compare it to the ‘laptop lamos’. Think about that the next time you mock me for wearing a leather apron to make hot drinks.”
*Name was changed to protect barista’s identity.
The Watsonia Bugle 