Around 9.27 am on most work days, a peculiar migration occurs in the Perth CBD.

Thousands of office workers embark on their morning trek, driven by their maddening, libidinous desire to consume, overpriced, milky coffee.

If you look closely you can see the tracks and ruts carved out of stone and concrete left by the dawdling medley of mammals making their daily novena to coffee shops.

The caffeine sojourn has taken on a religious tone. It’s become a daytime event steeped in ritual and ceremony.

Our coffee injections form the basis for critical socialising and social interaction, which sociologists have dubbed: I can’t be stuffed working just yet.

The Swedes even have a term for it: Fika. Which roughly translates to coffee and cake. Some historians believe the Nordic country abandoned its socialist experiment in the 1990s because nobody worked after Fika.  

Humans have been devoted to that delicate black bean ever since an Ethiopian goat herder called Kaldi first discovered their potential around 500 years ago, after watching goats trying to leap off a mountain after chowing down on the berries.

We have been rarely uncaffeinated since.

The coffee break has replaced the water cooler as the psychological totem where people have censorious conversations about their ever-mounting desires to murder their bosses.

But somewhere along our espresso evolution, humans have devolved into coffee-gathering subspecies with their obscure modes of expression.

There are the recent graduates: Also referred to as the Pink Flamingos of coffee drinkers given their inability to get java without the company of 12 other people.

They chat while getting their coffee, roaring like Howler Monkeys with overhasty conversations because everything is still unprocessed excitement. Life is not yet a series of dispiriting compromises for this endless gregarious bunch.

Everything is still a recent first. First sex. First drugs. First time listening to Radiohead’s Kid A; watching the movies of Scorsese or reading the books of Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Germaine Greer and Zadie Smith.

I’m not convinced these chirpy bastards even enjoy coffee. Their numbers tend to dwindle dramatically as predators find them easy to chase as their disturbingly powerful enthusiasm makes this group slow to move.    

But whatever these gladsome graduates are drinking it’s usually with almond milk.

Watching the Beef on Netflix and rummaging through their parents’ closets looking for 80s clothes.

Recent parents: The most feared species of them all. Have heedless disregard for everyone except their barista. Identifiable by the dried, baby vomit on their left shoulder and the look of someone that has been coming down from meth for six months.

Usually hunt in packs of four to six.

Other subspecies have tried to infiltrate this group but are usually torn to shreds by profoundly corrosive conversations about pelvic floors and failed vasectomies.

The coffee of choice is black. The bitter the better. Not watching or reading anything because they’re usually in bed by eight.

Middle-management millennials. This group has two very distinctive characteristics: keep cups and wokeness.

Still renting. No kids. Just came back from working in the UK for five years. Small cryptocurrency portfolio and volunteer at camps for kids that couldn’t get into exclusive, western suburb private schools.  

Urban anthologists believe this socially and politically aware group has thrived and overcome any compelling challenges because its members have developed a potent defence mechanism that evolves around being unbearably annoying. As such, the species has no natural predators.

Ironically watching Grey’s Anatomy, the Bachelor and can’t wait to tell everyone how they wept through episode three of The Last of Us.

Preferred coffee: Long black, long mac and will drink iced coffee from a straw.

Empty nesters: Either lamenting not having the kids at home or searching for the number of their old weed dealer. Tend to get their brain juice in small groups. 

Travelling back to Europe but staying in classy Airbnb’s instead of hostel bunk beds, as they did in their mid-20s. Picking up the guitar again and started felting highland cows and sheep.

Trigger happy when it comes to showing their workmates pictures of their grandkids.

Have an infinite lust for cappuccinos. These kid-free folk are the natural enemy of recent parents.

Nearly retired. It wasn’t that long ago when members of this group were left to die next to a tree with a coconut and a small stick to fight off any Saber-Toothed tigers.

The older java junkies are uniquely incapable of forging bonds with people, so will usually hide in nearby bushes waiting for other coffee drinkers to skedaddle.

When not torturing their colleagues with their self-serving blather about retirement, this group spends most of their day Googling: “Why does it hurt when I do this?”

Will get a cup of Joe solo or with another oldster. Usually men. Intolerant, misanthropic and a lot of chatter revolves around Led Zeppelin albums.

Will drink only flat whites because is unaware any other coffee exists. Watching the Beatles Get Back doco for the third time.

There are another subspecies of caffeine consumers that rarely undertake any coffee odyssey, so they’ve devolved into underground outcasts like the Morlocks in the H.G. Wells book, the Time Machine.

These creatures are mute to the coffee chatter because no buoyant banter has ever unfolded while waiting 30 seconds for the bean juice to heat up in the microwave.

Will always get their cup of mud alone.

I have zero statistical evidence to back up this next statement, but I have developed no meaningful relationships with instant* or pod drinkers*.

I’m sure there is a panoply of psychological reasons why these folk never decamp from their desks but given their imperturbable nature most work colleagues have come to the same unbudgeable verdict: these banal beverage drinkers are flavourless.

And spying a workmate sheepishly sauntering back down a corridor with a lukewarm cup of instant has all the existential charm of a character in an Albert Camus novel.

Tend to watch shows about serial killers and Survivor. 

If you want irredeemable evidence these subspecies and others exist just take a stroll around Perth any time after 9 am.

You might just find your coffee clan.

* Apologies to KA and SM.