excruciatingly-gained scars.

Work At the age of 19, Diane Shipley was staying with her boyfriend in Essex and decided to get a job as a waitress at the local cafe. It was an experience she would never forget ...

"Once I’d got the hang of all that, or we were all willing to pretend I had, I was trained in the use of the coffee machine, which quickly became my nemesis and source of several short-lived but excruciatingly-gained scars. Every time someone asked for a “frothy coffee”, I’d burn my wrist trying to manoeuvre the cup under a stream of boiling milk, attempting to jiggle both cup and nozzle just right so the froth would still exist by the time I got the cup to its table. Many times I failed and had to re-do it, sometimes more than once for the same customer, while my bosses sucked their teeth and shook their heads. I was considered such an unnatural, an imbecile, that I wasn’t even allowed milkshake machine privileges until my fifth week, and I wasn’t allowed cash till privileges ever.