Mos Mos

At one of my most depressing jobs, I worked for a mortgage company calculating the variable mortgage rates on residential properties. I had no idea what I was doing for the majority of the year I worked there and never attempted to properly learn the formula that would result in the correct mortgage rates for the company’s clients. Luckily, my colleagues all covered for me. Every day I layed in bed until the last possible moment to get up, get changed, and go to work. I felt like the shittiest version of myself to ever have existed. I could not be bothered to be anything to anyone. My sense of identity was shot and I was constantly on the verge of tears. 

At one of my lowest points, I remember a rare moment of pure connection with one of my favourite coworkers. It sticks out because there were so few moments of joy at this job that I could describe them all in less than five minutes. And I can be long winded. There were so few moments of happiness that didn’t revolve around me talking shit about another one of my coworkers that I hated for no reason.  I had no will to work let alone socialize or make the day fun for myself, something I usually always have the energy for. It was the type of job that lent itself to wasting your own and other peoples’ time but I couldn’t even muster up the energy to do that. I was beyond helping myself. 

One day, my colleague asked me to grab coffee with him. We had options of places to go because we worked in the downtown financial core which catered specifically to people needing coffees at 8am and 3pm. We walked downstairs to a cafe that recently opened up in the path, Mos Mos, to order lattes. There was no lineup when we arrived, so two people, a man and a woman, holding coffee cups and a sharpie, approached us right away to take our orders. We ordered. Then walked up to the cash, paid for ourselves, and waited in the designated spot for our orders to appear. 

What makes this coffee visit particularly special and important is that both my colleague and I have unusually spelled names. Our name experiences were similar in that we were often correcting people on our names’ spelling, having our names autocorrected for us to the wrong spelling.

We went to pick up our drinks and mine came out first. I hadn’t told the man who took my order the correct spelling but there it was, the less common way of spelling my name on my coffee cup. I showed it to my colleague in surprise. “They got the spelling right!” He looked so excited for me. He had no expectations for his cup when it came out but when it did, the person who took his order at the front of the store had also spelled his uncommonly spelled name right! We looked at his cup at the same time and immediately gasped. The chances of them both getting our names right on the same day, the same time. When they never did. It was a statistical anomaly. We were floored. I matched his excitement for his cup’s correct spelling and we stopped just short of jumping up and down while holding each other.

We took it as a good omen and decided to finish our drinks in the underground cafe, giggling to each other over our good luck. Right in front of us was the acknowledgement that we not only existed, but were alive. And that our names were worth spelling right.