ABSTRACT
The barista’s idle quasi-pleasantry chat was meant to smooth the transaction experience, an affect that employees are now expected to perform, and often intuitively prefer. Discourse transforms the norms into covert assumptions, upon which other layers of communication, like jokes, can then take place, in fractions of a second, forcing subjects to super-quick coding and decoding of many layers of meaning. The analyses rely on original ethnographic fieldwork observations and 'ethnographic interviews', conducted during 2013-14 with key figures in the field, usually in Hebrew and in the interviewees' university offices. Additionally, the fragments being analysed here were not chosen for being 'representative' of, or epitomising, a diverse field, because no quote can be, although they were not exceptional either.
