People Person

People Person

Cheryl used to love her job once. Well actually it wasn’t a job as such, it was a business. She had bought the café outright from her settlement money from her ex-husband Geoff. Years of abuse and treading on egg shells in a violent partnership hadn’t actually been what she looked forward to after leaving college. Fifteen years of not knowing when you were going to receive your next backhander because his tea wasn’t quite up to standard was enough for anyone she thought. After a surprisingly trouble free divorce from ‘the bastard’ as she liked to refer to him in front of her friends had enabled her to buy the café and tart it up into a little coffee shop. In the beginning and for the first few years she loved the day to day chat with customers and building up a regular clientele. Customers would come every day for a chat and to shoot the breeze over nothing in particular on their lunch breaks and to be honest Cheryl thought that she had never been happier.

 Things started to change when customers started to show up with laptops, phones and I pads. No one seemed to want to know anymore they just wanted to stare into the small screen and shut themselves off from the rest of the world. All Cheryl began to see were sets of hunched shoulders with an LCD screen reflecting in the faces of the once chatty customers. Coffee almost seemed to be an inconvenience, it meant looking up from the screen or talking the headphones out to say thanks you if they could be bothered. It wasn’t long before something snapped inside of Cheryl. She was a people person after all, she needed the interaction in fact she loved it. The customers didn’t notice, they were too busy playing Angry Birds or looking at yet another picture of a friends baby on Facebook.

The day after Cheryl’s mind snapped though there were a few changes. Well putting poison in the latte would alter things slightly wouldn’t it? All six customers that day had a good old swig of cyanide in their Latte Grande that morning. When the police finally got into the café a couple of hours later after a tip off from a whizz kid who wanted to charge his Mac and couldn’t get in the cafe for his free electricity they realised what a people person Cheryl was as she held court around one of her larger tables to the six dead customers who were propped neatly around the dining table, which incidentally had a small pile of electronic gear that had been smashed to smithereens. Rumour has it that Cheryl was waxing lyrical about the weather!

Colin