Ten minutes with the DOC baristas

Baristas Nicole Johnson, Marquita Govan and Amy Kanouff help keep the campus caffeinated.

Weekdays start at 4:15 a.m. for Nicole Johnson, the lead barista at the coffee cart near the gift shop on the second floor of the Durham Outpatient Center.

That’s when Johnson wakes up and gets ready for her day at the medical center, which is about a 45-minute drive from her home in Griswold, Iowa.

Her morning cohort, Amy Kanouff gets to sleep in. Her alarm goes off at 5:15 a.m.

They both arrive at work at 6 a.m. and their cart officially opens at 6:30, although they have a regular customer who shows up every morning at 6:25. Not that Johnson and Kanouff mind.

“Our customers are what we love most about our job,” said Kanouff, who has staffed the cart for five years.

Johnson — who has worked the cart for six years and oversees it and the coffee cart in Clarkson Tower — concurred. She said she’s particularly fond of their many regulars.

“We have great customers, everyone’s very polite and appreciative,” she said.

When Johnson says, “everyone,” she means the countless physicians, patients, researchers, students, staff, maintenance personnel and campus newsletter editors who converge on their cart daily to get their caffeine fixes.

“Our customers are what we love most about our job.” Amy Kanouff

Getting to know patients and their families is one aspect that makes working their coffee cart a bit different than working at the local Starbucks, Kanouff said.

“We really get to know these people and their back stories,” she said, noting that some patients who were treated at the medical center have returned just to visit the baristas.

About a year and half ago, Johnson and Kanouff started getting noon-time relief from Marquita Govan, the baby of the baristas if you will.

Govan helps out at the Clarkson Tower cart from 9 a.m. until about noon and then heads over to the DOC to assist Johnson and Kanouff through the post-lunch coffee rush.

Johnson and Kanouff each head home to their children (Johnson has two boys and a girl and Kanouff has three girls and a boy) at about 2:30 p.m., which means Govan flies solo until the cart closes at 4 p.m.

The cart is a relatively small workplace and it takes teamwork for three people to work together in such close quarters. But that’s no worry, Johnson said. There’s team spirit to spare among the baristas.

“We really do get along great and we get pretty close with each other,” Johnson said. “We like to hang out together after work, too. It’s just kind of what happens working this job.”