Places I work at on my side project

Victor Ponamariov
4 min readAug 16, 2020

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COSTA Coffee

My favourite one. I heard that this is British company, not sure if it’s well-known, but anyway.

This cafe is placed inside a shopping mall. I visited the mall for a few years and I worked in the cafe a few months before I started Pingr. I guess I get acquainted with everybody there: security, salesman, baristas, even some random people who lived somewhere near. I talked to baristas so much that they started to make me coffee for free :)

Here is a funny story. Once a barista showed me a paper, saying that this is kind of a legal complain to the cafe that they have their lights broken and the shopping mall asked them to fix this. She showed me the paper, and voila, I was on this paper because they took a photo of the cafe when the lights didn’t work and since I was all day working there, I was spotted. Here it is, I work with my laptop :)

Another funny story related to this cafe. Could you see the “COSTA COFFEE” letters at the photo? They are kind of glued to the wall. Once one of the letter just got unstick and hit my head and laptop. It was like flash of the light, very unexpected, I was like “wut?” :) But no complains, I get free coffee all the time, so.. :)

Starbucks

The Starbucks is placed inside a luxury mall which sells furniture. The mall motivated me because I love furniture and good design. So when I get there, I like the smell and the look of everything, and I remind myself that if I get something out of my product, I’ll probably approach my goals (one of them is having a good apartment with good furniture).

Once a barista told me that I remind him of Ernest Hemingway in his youth :) And here is the mall (called “Roomer”) itself.

Food store

This is a new food store located right in the building where Roomer is. It has a couple of seats right beside the windows, so I worked there too. Main reason was: it was cheap and it was open till 11 PM, so I had more time to work on this.

Gym!

I lied. I didn’t work at gym. Because they said that even though they are open 24 hours, they don’t allow me to work in their cafe after it’s closed and I still need to buy something (which would be expensive for me). However I worked in another gym’s cafe long time ago, this is not related to my current product.

Sushi restaurant

It was open like all night, so I worked few time here too. Not much stories there, except that few times I went home at 2–3 AM.

Coffee Bean

We need more coffee.

This one is located in the center of Moscow. It’s quite expensive but I liked it because it worked till 11 PM & the taste of coffee was awesome.

One of baristas here was so loud, she was always yelling “youuurr coffeee is waiting for yoooou” and everyone was smiling :)

Also almost everyone here learned languages! Like, there were a lot of teachers and students, and they all learnt different languages.

To be continued…

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