Over time, Pam gets to know the other regulars at the shop as well. It’s not a conscious decision, and she’s not sure she’s actually passed words (beyond “excuse me” or “I think that’s your order”) with all of them, but when you’re in a coffee shop most of the day on most of the days, you get this kind of diffuse knowledge that you can’t be sure where it came from, but you also can’t get rid of.

Dwight Schrute is at once the easiest and the most difficult of the other regulars to get to know. Easy, in that there is no mistaking him, not from Jim’s descriptions and not from his own inimitable stylings when she does finally encounter him. He is loud, German, and very precise in his orders and his disdain for the slightest variation from them. One time he orders a coffee at precisely 192 degree Fahrenheit (yes, he did specify Fahrenheit: Pam and Jim had a good laugh after he left at the idea of doing it at that temperature in anything else. “Oh, excuse me this is twice the boiling point of water at 192°C!” “No, no, it’s beyond frozen, a full chunk of coffee ice at 192K!”) and yells at Jim when the pocket infrared thermometer he pulls out has it at 191°F. She is fascinated by his strange personal hygiene, his obsession with beets, and the knowledge that, at any time, she could go through Zillow and buy herself a night at his macabre beet farm.

It’s also veeeeeery interesting that he requests a coffee at 192, when he himself drinks only the Schrute On Sight. There is, however, another regular who drinks their coffee at near-boiling (though she does not possess, to Pam’s knowledge, a infrared thermometer). Angela Martin is, as far as Pam can tell, an American Girl Doll come to life, except that would be a massive insult to the American Girl Dolls line. But she definitely dates from the first half of the twentieth century, dresses the part (although she does not, to Pam’s unending disappointment, wear kid gloves or spats—probably disdaining them as ostentatious) and has been heard to mutter, when another patron ordered Michael’s St. Patrick’s Day-themed drink, that “green is a whore’s color, even in drinks” (this was not Pam’s objection to the choice of beverage: hers was the much more reasonable  consideration that it was not in fact anywhere near St. Patrick’s Day. Apparently Michael liked to be prepared). Angela and Dwight were, Pam and Jim decided, simultaneously eminently suited for one another and a horrific combination. Pam suspected that she drank her coffee boiling because she believed that heating it so hot burned the devil out of it, since she had once heard her complain when served an actually drinkable beverage that “cold coffee is Satan’s bean.”

She wondered what Angela thought of her potential beau’s preference for coffee cooled by beet juice and sugar.

Oscar Martinez did not actually drink martinis, though Michael never stopped trying to upsell them to him (“gay people drink fancy booze!” he insisted once, before Jim had to take him back into the back). He did, however, bring a good book and sit and sip his caramel macchiato most Wednesdays, and Pam could not deny she approved of his taste . For a while the book was The Handmaid’s Tale; when he switched over to Game of Thrones she struck up a conversation—they both loved the medieval history of it and rolled their eyes at some of the gratuitous sex and violence—and thus her first non-barista friendship in the coffeeshop was born.

Oscar was sometimes accompanied by his friend Kevin, who was…not like that. On the days when Oscar and Kevin came in together, Kevin ordered hot chocolate. Always hot chocolate. The menu did not actually feature hot chocolate, but it seemed that Kevin was happy with whatever Jim made as long as it was called hot chocolate. This was a running gag, she eventually discovered—Jim and Kevin were in a fantasy league together and this was apparently the result of one of them losing a bet (she could never figure out which)—and while she appreciated Kevin’s loud belly laughs when Oscar or Jim made him amused, she avoided him, with Oscar’s connivance, after he stared at her breasts for just a little too long the first time they met. He wasn’t actively creepy, but she didn’t really need that energy in her life. Not after Roy’s friends, anyway.

There was another man who wanted to be a regular at the coffeeshop, and was on the days when Jim was the only one in, but who Michael always chased out with a broom when he stuck his head in the door. His name was Toby, she gathered, and he sometimes had a little girl with him that seemed to be his. But he was so quiet that she never really found out more, at least not until she knew Jim well enough to go to a party at his house—but that was much later on. He was the only other person she ever heard ask for tea, though, so she appreciated that.

Kelly Kapoor, however, was the opposite. Pam didn’t really want to be friends with her, but that was apparently not an option. Kelly was talking the entire time she was in the coffeeshop, rain, shine, or whatever, and it was a miracle honestly that Jim could decipher her order out of the words that continually spread out from her like a protective shell. She decided that “the slightly less cute than me girl in the corner”—as she dubbed Pam—was going to be her newest friend, and there was nothing Pam could do about it. She learned a lot about both celebrity culture and coffee brews along the way: Kelly drank it white enough to draw on, but insisted that despite all the half-and-half, the underlying brew was still vital to her happiness. She would vary it up, however, drinking Ethiopian one day, Brazilian the next, and Ecuadorean the third. “Fashion, you know,” she would say with a wink—and Pam did not know, but was definitely not going to ask. Fortunately it seemed that Michael’s odd ordering paradigm always had whatever it was she wanted available, so she was always in a good mood when Pam was by her.

Todd Packer was also a regular, but the less said about him, the better.

The best part of learning about all these people, though, wasn’t them—though she liked Oscar and eventually Kelly. It was the way that knowing them meant she knew Jim better—and that he knew her as well, as they exchanged thoughts and confidences about the other strange beings who inhabited the world of The Comedy Roasters.