Truck asked me to record my experiences at my new job.

I feel I have to explain a little first. I'm 32. I have two girls whom I love and I want to do everything in the world for them. Right now I stay home with them during the week while my wife (whom I will refer to as E) works. Two days a week they go to daycare. Now, the particular day care they go to is one of the best in Minneapolis in my humble opinion. They love the staff and the other kids and so we want to keep them there. We are, however, slowly going in to debt. So, at E's prompting I began looking for part-time work. "No problem," I thought. "I have skills." I thought I could easily find work that would, at least in some way, utilize my skills. Boy was I wrong. Maybe it's September 11, or whatever, but I ended up working in a chain coffee joint. (Not Starbucks.) Today was my third day.

Well, the pay is a little dismal. I'm expected to accept this meager pay, and somehow make this part-time job part of my identity. Now I like coffee. I probably like it more than most. I don't, however, want to make it a major part of my life. I think this is the most insidious part of the work culture in the U.S. We're supposed to take these shit jobs and then act like we're the luckiest damn people in the world to be working there. I had to go through two interviews to get this job. I couldn't help thinking, "I'm an adult. I'll show up. I'll do the work. What more do you want for this kind of pay?" Two damn interviews. It felt like a colossal waste of time. Of course I disguised my cynicism so successfully that they actually hired me.

So here I am, learning this new job. One of my supervisors wasn't even born yet when I got my driver's license. All my coworkers are twenty-somethings, although they all seem nice. I'm just not in the same place they are. Let me tell you, it put me into a depression for several days when I first got the job. I kept asking myself how I got to a place where I could do no better than slinging coffee for shit pay.

Well, it hasn't been as bad as I thought. As E will often point out, I often focus on the negatives. I still don't relish the job and I'm embarassed to tell my friends and family that I work there. Trucker says I shouldn't be embarassed. He has some valid points.

I just had this illusion that I was Randy from Cryptonomicon. I was ready for a substantive change in my outlook. I was ready to do what I needed to do for my family. Unfortunately I thought it would be something cooler, or more in line with my interests than a job that any 16 year-old could get.

I guess things don't happen quite like that in life. It works well for fiction, but those kind of changes don't occur overnight. It's usually years later that, in retrospect, we can point to a time or an event that changed our lives or our outlook. In the end I guess I did what was right for my family. (With tips, I make around $10/hr., which isn't bad for part-time work, and that kind of pay was my central-albeit modest-goal to begin with.) So today I'm feeling better about things.

E is going to kill me if I don't get some more things done around the house before she gets home. I don't know how often I can update this stupid thing. Hopefully I can do it often enough, I don't want to abandon it, but I really don't have time for another hobby. Wish me luck.