I'm $10 richer, but the coffee shop is way more than $10 poorer

I've only gotten up at 4:15 a.m. to go to work at my coffee shop job a handful of times, but no matter how much I'm getting used to it, it still royally sucks. It's even more horrible now that it's wintertime and all I can think about is how good it would feel to crawl back into my warm bed and snuggle under the covers with my fiance.

But because I'm responsible and because I need money in this super-expensive city, I grudgingly rolled out of bed at 4:15 a.m. to eat breakfast and look halfway decent before heading off to work - two minutes before I'm supposed to clock in. Because my commute is an average of four minutes, I'm usually right around two minutes late every day.

But when I'm heading to work at 4:43 a.m., I'm still halfway asleep because I haven't yet downed a few shots of espresso. That didn't stop my eyes from grabbing something unusual on the sidewalk on this particular morning, though (which is saying something because I've seen all sorts of random garbage blowing along the streets of NYC). It was folded up three times, but I still recognized it - cold hard cash. And no one around but me.

SCORE!!!

At first I thought there were two zeros behind the 1, but that excitement quickly dissipated when I saw Alexander Hamilton on the front of the bill instead of Benjamin Franklin. But still - it was $10!!! And it was mine (Hey - finders keepers, man)!!!

That's when I knew that it was going to be a good day.

The good day continued when I got to work and the water pressure in our store decided to quit - right in the middle of the morning rush. This is good because no water pressure equals no espresso shots (which is in probably about 90 percent of the drinks), no tea, and no coffee that isn't hadn't already been brewed, so it meant that I had to actually do very little.

The only thing I got to do - which was priceless in several situations - was listen to the customers order and either do what I could for them or watch the shock register on their faces when I told them that no, they could not have "their" drink. I actually saw some of them contemplating suicide when they realized they would not be getting their morning coffee.

For example, one woman came in and ordered a drink that required espresso. I told her that we could not make that particular drink, explained why, and watched her face go from gleeful as she was ordering to horrified when I offered her some regular, brewed coffee. Like that was even an option.

"Nooooooo!!! All I really wanted this morning was [said drink]," she whined as if her entire day was going to be thrown off because of me (which it probably was. People are INSANE when it comes to their rituals.)

This became more apparent as the minutes went on. Every time a new batch of customers came through the door, I announced the situation so everyone could hear it and they could either choose to stay in line for what we did have to offer, which does include morning pasteries, or walk out and find another place that sells coffee. Which is on every corner in New York City. But whatever.

Most people were understanding, though a bit miffed. But one lady, who waited in line for about 23 seconds, totally blew up when she asked if she could have a particular drink, and I told her no.

"Well, why didn't you post a sign on the door saying that? I never would have waited if I had known that," she huffed while throwing her money back into her cheap, designer knockoff and storming out.

What would the sign have said? I wondered. "Don't bother coming inside between the minutes of 6:11 a.m. and 6:32 a.m. today because we will not be able to make certain drinks, but you'll never know which ones unless you come in and ask"?

Besides, as one of my colleagues astutely pointed out, people don't read signs, so Ms. Bitchiness' suggestion would have been futile. And the inconvenience lasted about 20 minutes - which was enough time for the coffee that we had brewed that morning disappear as if it were the last vaccine on Earth for a deadly disease. By that point, we were also getting dangerously low on the last warm beverage we had to offer - decaf coffee, which some people accepted when they realized that the only alternative was to not have any coffee at all.

I have always been fascinated by psychology, and because I really had nothing more to do than ruin people's day, I simply observed the morning trainwreck as a psychologist would watch an experiment into the human psyche. And it's f'd up, man. But it's also unbelieveably fascinating.