"First, let’s decide positions."
That was the very first thing I said to the guys when we got back to the dorm last night.
"Positions?"
Lee Cheonghyeon shot back.
Fair enough, since we’d all learned everything together from how to make an Americano to how to make smoothies.
But if we did it that way, customers would be waiting forty minutes each. There’s a reason division of labor keeps advancing in modern society.
I assigned roles based on the performances they’d shown.
First, considering how naturally Jeong Seongbin smiles and talks to people and how meticulous he is, I put him on counter order-taking.
Next, I had Lee Cheonghyeon fully leverage his extraordinary memory and quick thinking to compare finished drinks against the order slips and call out customers.
Kang Giyeon and Choi Jeho were bundled as a set to handle smoothies and tea-based drinks. Those two complement each other; rather than splitting them up, it’s better to stick them together as one team.
And Park Juu...
"Juu, think of yourself as pulling shots all day."
"What if customers end up ordering only drinks that don’t use coffee...?"
That won’t happen. You could make Americanos all day and still be short of hands on your side.
Lastly, I took on making coffee-base drinks other than Americanos, taking out trash, and jumping to dishwashing if Choi Jeho and Kang Giyeon couldn’t keep up, and so on.
Sure enough, as soon as we entered the cafe, the guys took their spots and checked the ingredients.
"Did you decide to stand in these positions ahead of time?"
The PD asked Jeong Seongbin, who was sticking a memo to the POS terminal.
"Yes! Iwol looked up cafe interior images yesterday and we discussed it in advance!"
Maybe because it was our first official variety appearance, the discipline was razor sharp. I was about to award them mental gold stars when a camera suddenly swung toward me.
"Iwol, how did you know it would be this cafe? Yesterday we only told you the approximate area."
"I narrowed it down to places near the spot you gave us that had an open kitchen and normally used three or more part-timers. Since you said it would be run as an event, I picked cafes with their entrance on a main road."
"Are you saying you found this place with just that?"
I didn’t decide at once; I filtered down from about ten to a final top three, then just previewed the interiors of all three.
If I explained every detail, it might come off as bragging over nothing, so I let it go.
Just then, the opening-prep alarm sounded.
As a rule, production’s intervention stops starting from prep time. Which means from the moment that alarm rings.
I tied on my apron and prayed inwardly.
Wishing for something ridiculous like, please let every office worker commuting to Gangnam today be in a good mood.
"Hey, youngest."
"Yes, PD!"
"They said those kids don’t have much part-time experience, right?"
The main PD asked, sounding baffled. The youngest writer glanced toward the kitchen and nodded.
"Then why are they moving so fast?"
Spark was so calm it was hard to believe their average age wasn’t even twenty.
"I did think they were unusual when they all showed up matching in black T-shirts."
Since we had rented an independent cafe, there were no uniforms here.
Because idol groups need to appeal individually, production figured they’d come dressed cleanly with their own bit of flair.
But Spark defied expectations and all appeared in black short-sleeve T-shirts.
On top of that, they somehow had six identical aprons, as if they’d bought them separately. From a distance, they looked unmistakably like the cafe’s own staff.
"Why did you bring aprons?"
"We thought it would be rude to use the cafe’s supplies recklessly."
...Or something like that. Their preparedness was impressive.
Up to this point, the staff were surprised, but not thrown.
Anyone can have a plan. At least until you collide with reality.
And before long, office workers heading for 8 o’clock start times began to flood in.
This was exactly when we should be filming flustered cast scrambling through early orders.
It was. But—
"I’ll help confirm your order! Is it iced Americano for you?"
"Seongbin, from now on, when you take orders tell them there’s at least a ten-minute wait!"
"Three iced Americanos going out... now!"
Beyond the bar table, drinks were being produced like a factory.
And not only that.
"Choi Jeho, are your hands free? Open a fresh carton of milk for me."
"I’ve got nothing to do right now—anyone got a task for me?"
"Giyeon, can you wipe these coffee grounds here...?"
When work piled up on one side, the other members swarmed to help and then returned to their stations with impressive speed.
"Communication among the members is really good."
Listening to their quick exchanges, the sound director was impressed.
Even in the chaos of a crowd, when they targeted ➤ NоvеⅠight ➤ (Read more on our source) someone, they clearly called that person by name, and when asking for help, they were as specific as possible. It kept anyone from having to repeat themselves.
The timing of Kim Iwol’s interventions—he’d called his role general chores—was on point, too.
He flitted around the kitchen rustling, then every thirty minutes on the dot he swung back to infinitely co-produce Americanos with Park Juu.
Sure enough, right on schedule again, Kim Iwol called toward the kitchen.
"I filled the paper cups and rinsed the dishcloths, so use them if you need. I folded the cup carriers and put them in the break room because there was no space!"
"Got it!"
No sooner had he finished than another wave of customers poured in.
"Does he have some kind of luck for drawing customers?"
The main PD thought Iwol was just a guy with a lot of work-luck. But soon realized it wasn’t coincidence.
Even with flexible hours being introduced, start times in Korea were still mostly fixed.
Nine to six was the basic, but lots of places staggered start times by thirty-minute marks from seven or eight.
There was a reason customers surged every time Iwol popped out like a cuckoo clock.
It was something even production, who started filming at dawn for the "look how they suffer" picture, hadn’t anticipated.
After that war-like stretch passed and ten o’clock came, the rush at the cafe began to ease.
Time to catch our breath, and...
"Who was it that planned to eat lunch early? Come grab your lunch boxes now."
"Me, Kang Giyeon, and Seongbin!"
...it was time for half the manpower to eat.
Handing out lunch boxes to the younger ones, Kim Iwol stepped up to the POS to relieve Jeong Seongbin.
Seizing a lull in the kitchen, the PD entered with a camera and asked:
"Iwol, you’re going to take orders?"
"Yes. I think I can do it just looking at Seongbin’s memo."
Where he pointed, there were memos Seongbin had stuck on before opening.
They neatly listed the order-taking phrases, the bean varieties, and the final confirmation line for orders.
Iwol handled the occasional orders smoothly.
Every now and then a customer would order multiple cups as a coffee errand, but with Americano specialist Park Juu and other-drinks specialist Choi Jeho each staying behind, there was no disaster of yanking people back mid-meal.
"Was there a reason you set the eating order ahead of time, too?"
"Yes. Our members are still growing, so they can’t skip—they need to eat."
Then Iwol grinned. It was the kind of smile that made you think, that kid’s going to do fine in society.
The afternoon was twice as hectic as the morning.
First, office workers flooded in on their way back from lunch.
The ripple effect of the free event being rumored was big, too. People who’d heard from coworkers came, and the cafe front was a sea of people.
A staffer had been kept on standby for just such a time, but Spark’s response remained calm.
Since order-taker Jeong Seongbin was giving wait times up front, customers without time to spare turned around on their own.
The remaining customers placed orders knowing they’d have to wait, so there were no complaints.
"Not that it mattered much; drinks were coming out within ten minutes anyway."
With each person handling just one area, everyone seemed to have picked up proficiency, and their working speed rose.
The only difference was Iwol’s movement pattern.
In the morning he’d bounced between general chores and Park Juu’s side; now he was busily running between the fridge and the blender.
"Mango yogurt smoothie and Shine Muscat ade are ready for pickup!"
The menu items Lee Cheonghyeon called out were much more varied than in the morning.
The main PD looked once at the lineup of vivid-colored drinks in front of Lee Cheonghyeon, and once at Kim Iwol pulling a fresh pack of frozen strawberries from the commercial fridge.
"They... work well."
It looked like the "Compilation.zip of cast who conquered Life Experience" would be adding a new entry soon.
The Life Experience shoot wrapped without incident.
While Choi Jeho and I were doing closing cleaning, the ones who’d gone home early showed up in their own clothes and gave us a start.
"Why are you here?"
"What do you mean, ‘you’? We’re customers."
"Boss, please give us four of whatever is the most work at this cafe!"
They said that—and then sprang back, refusing when I offered to make them Earl Grey Peach Shake.
Then they grumbled about how this cafe had so much dust, and each pulled out a cleaning tool and completely finished tidying the place.
"Come on, what kind of cafe makes customers work?"
"Anyone who didn’t order a drink isn’t a customer."
Bantering like that, we finished the closing line—and it was 11 p.m.
I stayed up all night with my eyes wide open in case the company called like, "Guys, did you cause trouble on site?" but no such call came.
So I thought Spark’s first variety outing had done just middlingly well.
"Guys."
"What is it?"
"Spark is on the real-time hot topics!"
"Really?!"
Not long after the shoot day, on the day the episode aired—
At the manager’s sudden drop-in to the practice room, the kids stopped mid-dance and ran to him.
On the phone screen, the word Spark blazed clearly.
Life Experience Spark
1,210 posts
Life Experience Pager Guy
2,509 posts
.
.
.
"Whoa... whoa!"
"Life Experience Pager Guy" himself, Lee Cheonghyeon, who was riding a wave of popularity, stared wide-eyed and checked the phone again and again.
Next to him, I saw Choi Jeho frown slightly as he looked down at the screen. Guess without his glasses, he can’t see letters that size very well.
"All that scrubbing of the blender paid off."
Even Kang Giyeon shrugged his shoulders in satisfaction.
Jeong Seongbin, quietly looking at his phone, wore a faint smile and murmured, "Right."
Maybe it was because everyone was satisfied that we buttoned the first button without a single mistake.
Up to that point, I hadn’t noticed that my very small mistakes were piling up.
