Preparing to Open
After the subscriber home-visit event wrapped up, my days went a long stretch without any real change or excitement.
I'd take the dogs out while the worst of the heat held off, film a decent video, edit it, and upload. Everything else was leisurely time spent glued to Noona's side.
And right now was one of those leisurely stretches.
"Noona, why does it feel like time's flying by so fast?"
The thought struck me out of nowhere while I lay with my head pillowed on her thigh, idling the afternoon away beside her. Awakening a new superpower felt like yesterday, and yet a fair amount of time had already slipped past.
"Who knows? Maybe because your stamina's weak?"
"What are you talking about all of a sudden. What's wrong with my stamina!"
Ha. A new breed of provocation? Looked like I'd have to show off my steel-clad stamina again.
"If your stamina's that good, how about taking the kids out for one more walk?"
"Never mind. I think the frail-stamina theory checks out."
Another walk with our dogs? I'll take the junk stamina, thanks. My legs were already trembling, and it hadn't even been that long since the last one.
"Those things aren't dogs. They're something with infinite stamina wearing a dog mask……."
"Can't really argue with that."
Noona gave a wry smile. She knew our dogs' stamina just as well as I did.
I was the one who actually walked them, but every so often she'd say she wanted to get some exercise and tag along. She never managed to run with us, though. She couldn't keep up behind me while the dogs dragged me down the road.
Still, walks that amounted to high-intensity workouts had left me feeling healthier than I used to. That much I could count as a gain. Wanting to quit was a separate matter.
"But why'd you bring that up out of nowhere?"
"Just……. Watching them put up the building for the cafe, it feels like time's racing by."
At first, while they compacted the earth and laid the foundation, the thudding and the rat-a-tat-tat of the work had rung out all day long. Now that noise had all but vanished. The building's base was finished enough to call complete, and what remained was exterior trim and a coat of paint—the interior aside, of course.
"Now that you mention it, we're already close to the completion date."
Only a few days remained until the date the construction company had given us. Calling it a completion date was one thing, but we'd still need time for the interior and the rest, so we couldn't actually open the cafe a few days from now.
"Oh, right—shouldn't we start looking for staff soon? If we train them ahead of time, we won't hit snags once we open."
"Yeah. I was already trying to figure out how to handle it. A place that size, Yeongji and I can't run it by ourselves. And I still have to film your videos."
I had no choice but to agree.
Given the kind of cafe I was building, nobody was going to buy a drink and take it to go, but the floor was so huge it could hold a lot of people. The headcount it could take wasn't small either, so one or two employees would never be enough. Even if we ignored cleaning and everything else and only made drinks, we'd still need two people at minimum.
"Noona. Then how about we just hire them now, while we're at it?"
"The staff?"
"Yeah. We train them in advance and treat everything up through the interior being finished as a training period. It's not an ordinary cafe, so I figure they'll need a fair amount of training."
"That's true. We'll have to screen for animal allergies ahead of time, too……. And we should put the precautions together and brief them before they start."
Realizing that, unlike hiring part-timers for an ordinary cafe, there was a whole list of things to teach, we posted listings on the job sites right away. We made it clear we were looking for people who could work at the cafe in Gijang starting about a month out, once the interior was done and we could actually open. And because it was an animal cafe, we added a line excluding anyone with allergies to animal fur and the like.
Hiring was hard, and finding work was hard, and yet in the middle of that absurd mess the resumes started landing one after another, fast.
"We're really going to pay them this much?"
The reason, of course, was pay that ran higher than anywhere else. Less part-time wages than a salary on the level of an ordinary office worker. I could still call myself something of a newcomer, but thinking back on the passion pay I'd swallowed when I first stepped into the working world—the kind of wage that pays you in experience and nothing else—I couldn't turn around and hand someone else the same deal.
"Even this feels a little low, though. I have a feeling people are going to pack in pretty hard, and I'm sure plenty of them will quit saying it's too tough even for this money."
If I was right, the place would be wall to wall. And that meant the work would get that much harder. More people inevitably meant more jerk customers, too.
Noona, though, still looked uneasy about employing that many people at high salaries. She was worrying about the off chance that hardly any customers showed up.
"Don't worry so much. We're opening while we promote on Mutube. From day one, the place'll be crawling with people."
"You think?"
"I said so. Don't you trust me? I mean—don't you trust Oppa?"
"……Since when are you Oppa."
Noona laughed like she couldn't believe me. But her worry eased by about that much.
Thanks to that, we threw ourselves into hiring. Maybe because she'd run a cafe before, she narrowed the resumes down in no time, and once we'd picked out a handful we went straight into interviews.
We couldn't interview inside a building that was still being finished, so the location was the cafe Noona used to run. It had shut down under the flood of customers and jerk customers who'd shown up after the place suddenly got famous. The building owner had needed cash in a hurry and dangled a steep discount if she prepaid a year's rent, and Noona had fallen for it completely, so a good stretch of the lease was still left—which made this possible. A little dust had settled, but the fixtures and equipment were all still there.
"Excuse me."
Noona, Yeongji, and I were giving the cafe a light once-over when someone eased the door open and stepped inside. A woman who looked about Yeongji's age.
"What brings you in?"
"I was told to come for an interview today. I'm Lee Hyeji. I applied for the drinks team."
At Miss Hyeji's words, I immediately ran my eyes down the stack of printed resumes.
Here she is.
About halfway through, there was the name Lee Hyeji, and a photo that matched the woman standing in front of me.
"Twenty-one. Oh, and you have barista experience."
"Yes……. I got into it because I love coffee."
Something about Hyeji felt strongly like the same breed as Yeongji. They were even the same age. Noona seemed to feel it too; beside me, she kept looking from Yeongji to Hyeji and back. And Yeongji herself was staring at Hyeji with her eyes lit up bright.
"Can you pull a good cup of coffee?"
"Yes!"
Pride in her coffee, apparently—Hyeji answered with real force. I glanced at Noona and Yeongji, and Yeongji stepped in.
We'd already settled how the interviews would go. Whatever else, the drinks team would be handled however Yeongji wanted. She led Hyeji behind the counter and, without preamble, told her to pull an americano. The machine wasn't even powered on, but—credentials real or not—she switched it on like she'd done it a thousand times and had the coffee out in a flash.
"Passed!"
Yeongji took one sip of what Hyeji had pulled and declared her hired on the spot.
Noona and I stared, dumbfounded, but we had no choice but to take the interviewees filing in behind her, one by one. We'd agreed from the start to leave the drinks team to Yeongji, so there wasn't much to say.
The interviews, split across several rounds over several days, only ended once we'd hired nearly thirty people.
Thirty sounded like a lot, but it really wasn't. Divided between weekdays and weekends, then again between mornings and afternoons, it thinned out fast. People actually on the floor at the same time came to about seven or eight.
"Whew……. Hiring people is a job all by itself."
"You're telling me. I could barely manage two or three. Thirty people……. I'm gonna die."
Hiring around thirty meant we'd seen nearly twice that many. Judging that many people was never going to be easy, and plenty of them were my subscribers, people who recognized me, which made it worse. I had to do fan service—photos and the like—before and after the interviews, so of course I was wiped out.
"Aaaaah! I'm so sad this isn't even the end."
It wasn't over. Hiring was done, but the people we'd hired still had to be trained.
The moment that sank in, Noona collapsed onto the table and flailed her arms and legs. She was already wrung out, and a mountain of work still waiting drove her straight into denial.
"If we grind through it this once, the next round'll be easier. Let's just push."
"Ugggh! Fine. Nothing else for it."
She fled reality one last time, then nodded and accepted it.
Train them this first time, and after that the seniors could teach the new hires and take the load off us. Holding onto the thought that this was truly the last of it, we threw everything we had into training the staff. Yeongji took the drinks team, Noona took customer service, and I trained the rest—the ones who'd be caring for the animals.
The other teams could be trained at the cafe Noona used to run. The staff who had to actually care for the animals and help run the cafe could not. So I ended up off on my own, calling them out near the house.
"You'll be in charge of caring for the animals at the cafe. Calling it care makes it sound like more than it is, so please don't worry. What you'll be doing is stopping jerk customers from harming the animals, and protecting any animal that doesn't want to be touched."
Their job was simple. On top of basics like clearing tables that hadn't been cleared, they'd look after the animals.
I was the one who could talk to them. The customers couldn't. There would absolutely be people who did things the animals hated without meaning to, and in the worse cases, people who meant to torment them on purpose. What the staff had to do was shut those jerk customers down and throw them out. That was why, unlike customer service—mostly women—about half the hires here were big, solid men.
I predict it. No, I prophesy it. Among those jerk customers, there will be, one hundred percent, people who tuck their tails and run the second they're standing in front of the big guys.
Anyway, once I'd told them what the job would be, the first thing I did was introductions between the animals and the staff. The people who had to care for them couldn't be too awkward to even walk up.
"The hell are these humans."
"They're the people who'll be taking care of you at the cafe from now on."
"Oh! That so?"
Namcat eyed the staff with a look I didn't like. Uneasy, I rushed to add—
"That does not mean you get to work them however you want. Don't grab anybody and demand Churu."
"Ptui."
The wind went right out of him. Wait. Do cats even spit?
Unlike that endlessly crooked Namcat, though, the other animals started getting along with the staff pretty well. Natae, above all of them, got close in a class of his own. He latched onto one employee and made them carry him around.
I'd been the one doing the teaching, and yet watching him tap the arm of the person holding him and point at wherever he wanted to go was beyond absurd. I could already see him pulling the same thing on customers once we opened, and my head started to hurt.
He could still end up a mascot for the cafe, so I forced my attention onto the other animals. Not that any of them were normal, either.