Penny schools 📔✏️
"In Seattle, you haven’t had enough coffee until you can thread a sewing machine while it’s running."
—Jeff Bezos
> late to the resistance | revolution
Coffeehouses have a centuries-long tradition of hosting formal and informal debate and discourse.
- Places to gather for coffee helped fuel the French Revolution and the American Revolution and U.S. soldiers in Italy fighting fascism during World War II.
Intellectual inquiry and at least a begrudging willingness to question one's own perspectives are hallmarks of coffeehouses worldwide. The owner of a Tulsa coffee shop where I worked embraced this tradition. 🧋☕
He's bookish and wrote his own book about selling good coffee in a flyover state. He doesn't eagerly conform to Tulsa's stuffy, conservative impulses and establishment.
That doesn't mean he's a coffeehouse wallflower, though.
During a Slack debate over showing up late to work (that's me), the owner had a stern reminder. He was enough of a traditionalist that it didn’t trouble him to terminate someone in order to maintain discipline over tardiness.
I was arguing that a few minutes of lateness just didn't hurt anything or anyone.
Tardiness policies are an unchallenged custom built on generational and arbitrary truthinesses that we react to irrationally and emotionally, not rationally.
Then I argued that Italians were late to everything. It didn't bring the country to its knees, I said. Terminating people over minor lateness is an emotional reaction to a cultural custom and human construct.
That's when the owner dropped a highly logical counterargument to my position that sent glass spraying in every direction.
"It only works if everyone is late."
- next time "We’re often wrong but never in doubt."
- listening Duster "Constellations"
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