At 5:30 p.m. one recent Thursday, Melissa, a barista at a Stony Brook, N.Y. Starbucks stood behind an array of syrup flavoring and smiled at a crowd of what she called “regulars.” A line of four people waited at the register to order while a group of teenage girls in black pea coats and Ugg Boots waited at the other end of the counter for their drinks to be made.

“Oh my God,” one of the girls shrieked while looking at the pink Motorola Razr her blonde friend gripped with excitement. “I can’t believe he said that!”

“I know!” the cackling blonde said while clicking through a text message.

“Tall vanilla latte, non-fat milk,” yelled the cashier loud enough so that the barista could hear her over the giggling girls.

Two separate doors at opposite ends of the shop allowed for customers to enter and exit in mobs. Each time the door closest to the counter opened, a rush of cool air would swirl in and rustle the pages of a novel being read by a woman with thick black hair and bangs sitting at a round table. She didn’t seem to mind.

The sun was just beginning to set behind the bustling rush-hour traffic on 25A and the after-work and school crowd had arrived for their caffeine fix. Among them were grocery shoppers who had just checked out of one of the two grocery stores that reside in the same shopping center as this particular Starbucks.

“I’m here for the convenience,” said Maria Bailey, a senior at Stony Brook University who was holding a shopping bag filled with Bok Choy and green sprouts. “I was just shopping in Waldbaum’s right over there and now I have some time to kill before the bus comes to bring me back to my dorm.”

She leaned against one of the windows across from a display of Guatemalan Coffee sipping her tall cappuccino.

“I don’t mind waiting here – even if I have to stand,” she said with a chuckle.

Maria was standing because all 11 round tables and three couches were occupied by people with important books and flickering laptops.

All of these people were away from the chaos of the counter in a different ambiance – a cove of concentration so deep, that an onlooker could practically see the imaginary cubicles engulfing them and their Blackberries. Each person sat alone engaged in work under nine dim lights except for two women chatting at the far corner of the store. An orange fire crackled intermittently and warmed the air as Dean Martin played lightly in the background.

The setting and music was enough to make one imagine another era. Perhaps a time when lean, luxurious women lounged in their velvet covered parlors and gingerly smoked long, thin cigarettes. They didn’t have to work or worry about lung cancer. They just had to smoke, gossip and look positively poised and beautiful while doing so.

But it was a different time at Starbucks and women had notable careers. Young women wrote feverishly in notebooks and typed rapidly on MacBooks. One overweight woman in a red shirt and thin gold glasses sighed loudly as she graded papers with a red pen. Every so often she’d explode with a heavy cough.

“Minus 16 points, plus two for the bonus would make this 84, 85, 86 percent,” she said to herself quietly.

A young Chinese woman in a plaid jacket and Chuck Taylor’s sat near a window with a giant biology textbook and a small black laptop. Her name was Helen, an aspiring nephrologist at the Stony Brook School of Medicine.

“I come here because of the yellow light,” she said while brushing her straight black hair out of her eyes. “It helps me to focus. I’m also paying for the Internet right now so I don’t waste my time doing unnecessary things on it.”

Three tables away from Helen sat Shawn, a linguistics graduate student at Stony Brook who once took the LSAT when he was considering law school.

“I like there to be stuff going on around me while I study,” said the hot chocolate drinker who expressed a profound interest in documenting lost languages. “It helps me feel like I’m not missing out on anything interesting.”

Squirming in his chair, he craned his neck to look around.

“I’m here everyday and so is that girl over there,” Shawn said and pointed inconspicuously to a young woman by the fire place with a navy blue hooded sweatshirt on. “And people just get more diverse as the night goes on.”

Approximately 10 paces away from Shawn, a pre-pubescent-looking boy sat breathing noticeably. He seemed jittery. Less than five minutes later, a woman of about 50 walked in and looked around until her eyes landed on the boy. They embraced each other in an awkward handshake and then sat down.

It could have been mistaken for an eHarmony date gone horribly wrong until the boy took off his black jacket to reveal a suit and reached for his resume laminated in plastic binding.

Suddenly, at the far door entered a woman dressed in leather from head to toe. Her spiked heels pounded the tiles in a staccato rhythm. Her rough suntanned face blurred through the air as her platinum blonde hair careened along with it. She only came in to use the bathroom.

Some customers snarled.

“We’ve seen some crazy people,” Melissa the barista said with a giggle. Working at Starbucks for eight years had put her through college at Stony Brook University where she majored in art. She was now working towards a teaching degree.

“She means that in a good way,” Ruth, a cashier, added.

“Not always!” Melissa instigated.

After thinking for a minute, Ruth went on to talk about a time when someone had left a backpack outside the store and a customer had reported it as suspicious. Melissa laughed as she remembered the incident as well.

“Someone said it could have been a possible bomb so the police came and taped off the area,” Ruth said. “And it was just beer! So afterwards, I took the backpack for myself.”

“You took the backpack?!” Melissa asked in disbelief.

“Yeah, why not?” Ruth said with a shrug. “It was a perfectly good backpack.”