Julie at the Drive Thru

I found this while I was clearing out my documents, it's from my creative writing class. The assignment was to write a memoir based on a person or an event, and it could only be one page. Do you have any idea how long it took me to edit it down to one page? Like 3 hours! Compared to the 10 min it took me to actually write! Seriously... When I finished writing it I had about three pages, and so began the editing. And this is the product of all of my hard work:


A lady had come in earlier in the day and purchased a $10 gift card and then left it in the store, asking us to use it to pay for some of our customer's drinks. I was not there to witness this, but was told about it by my manager, who, right after saying this said that the lady should have left it for us because it would have gone further with our discount. “So you want to steal from customers?” I asked. He was saved from having to answer as a customer pulled up in the drive thru at that moment. Iced Venti Latte, it was Julie, one of our regulars.

When she got to the window one hand held her smoldering cigarette, burned down almost to the butt, the other was handing me her Starbucks gold card (a card that you pay a monthly fee on and you get 10% off everything you purchase), then tried to hand me her money. I told her that she didn’t have to pay for this one; a lady had given us a $10 gift card to use for our customers. “Oh, well now that was nice!” “Yes, it really was,” I hand her back her gold card, “we’ll have your latte in a second.” “Here, put this in your little change jar,” and she hands me what is probably all of her loose change. “Thank you!” “Now I’m not broke!” she breaks out into an even bigger smile than before and holds up two dollar bills. At that moment Rob shows up with her latte, “Here you go.” I grab a long straw and lean out the window to hand it to her.

“This may sound a little weird, but does anyone in there have a Tylenol or Aspirin? Julie’s got a headache.” “Ummm… Let me check” I pull myself further inside and ask everyone if they have any Tylenol, Julie wants some. I get some looks of Go tell Julie she’s crazy! so I head back to the window to tell her that no one has any. “I’m sorry, no one has any.” “Oh that’s ok, I’m going shopping, that will probably make it go away.” “Have fun!” She pulls up a bit and begins to empty her car of trash, taking her time and making sure that she’s gotten every bit of garbage, while the car behind her tries to pull up to the window.


From all of that you're supposed to be able to get a feel for the person's personality. I don't know if I was able to capture Julie perfectly, I mean, I only had a page to work with... But I think that I did a pretty decent job with what I was given to work with. I even managed to capture a little of the behind-the-scenes Starbucks action. Well, at least, for my Starbucks. My Starbucks rocks!