Looking Beyond the Data: Sorlie and Jilly's Exploration of Customer Behaviors

Sorlie:

The four-hundredth customer through the door is a man with an average-length beard and a hat. He orders two coffees and pays in coin. While my sister Jilly prepares the drinks, I look up his information. His name is Frederick and he's lived in the city for eight years. The number of times he's been here is four hundred and five. The last time was six days ago; before that it was eight days. Every time his order has been two coffees, so at least he sticks to what he likes. I'm looking over at Jilly as she hands him his change when I see her expression change from a smile to a frown, like she's just seen something that makes her sad. She takes her eyes off of him to look at me and mime words with her hand by her head, "Weird," then mouths the word repeatedly until I understand.

I start looking into other customers' information - their names, ages, where they live - trying to find the one who could be making Jilly sad. There are three men sitting in a corner talking about something, but nothing about them looks particularly weird. There's an old woman who just came in and ordered a tea, but she doesn't seem any more weird than anyone else in here.

After serving all of our customers this morning, we're sitting down for a break as we do every few hours. I normally don't like to talk while Jilly is taking a drink, because she gets really loud when she slurps her beverages, but there aren't any customers right now so I decide to ask what's wrong."What's wrong?" I mime at her after giving her time to gulp down some water.

"This guy," she says pointing at Fredrick sitting by himself on a stool in front of the counter staring into space, "He's been staring like that for fifteen minutes now." When she does that thing where she smiles with only her mouth closed and raises an eyebrow, I know there's something going on in her head that isn't quite normal. That look is always there when she sees people doing things out of the ordinary or strange or "weird". Sometimes it's just someone wearing something different than what other people wear or acting differently than most people act, but sometimes it's much weirder things like hearing two people talking about something private or seeing someone walking down the street picking their nose or scratching their armpits with both arms or anything else that you can tell they shouldn't be doing if they knew other people were watching them do it.

Now I'm starting to get really curious at what could be making Jilly think this customer was doing something weird because he hasn't done anything even slightly strange since he walked in except sit motionless staring forward without saying anything to anyone even though he has our attention focused on him right now as we watch him stare straight ahead without moving his head or blinking or breathing at all until...