Hello. This is Charlie Trotter.
Here lies my internet scrapbook/bully-pulpit. Below are some actions you can take.
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Beans for Babies
It’s time to tell you. I’ve been working part-time at Starbucks for the last year in addition to my full-time job at Trabian. Last Friday was my last day.
The main reason I haven’t told you until now is I didn’t want to give anyone a chance to think Trabian was doing poorly to the point I needed a second job. Despite my being able to give you a great reason – coming here in a second – to think otherwise, the Hive has never failed to assume inconveniently. So, since our clients and potential clients are only a few savvy clicks away from any of our personal Websites, I decided not to spook anyone and play my cards close for a time. Trabian didn’t ask me to do that. It was my own decision.
The Reason
As you know, when it comes to health insurance, small companies can’t get any better rate than an individual, and an individual can’t hardly get a rate that will cover much more than the price of the pine box his family will bury him in if he is decapitated. Plus Emergency Room fees.
We were living with these terms until I put a baby in my wife. Our second child was planned, but the addition of a maternity rider on our high-deductible, catastrophe insurance was not. So, it was time to think about picking up a PT gig with a big company for the insurance. I chose Starbucks because I love coffee and have only heard great things about working for them.
The Result
Since February of 2008, I’ve been working the opening shift at a local Starbucks at around 20-25 hours a week to maintain benefits eligibility. My shifts were typically 4:30am-8:30am, then I would come home and work a full day for Trabian.
This has been one of the hardest years of my life, but I mean it when I tell you I’m glad I had to do it, glad I GOT to do it. It was one thing for me to speak romantically about making sacrifices for my family when, at the time, it really just meant re-labeling my “iTunes Money,” “Diaper Money” and trying not to whine about it. But when it meant getting a second job for a year that would leave me exhausted, cranky, impatient and anxious 80% of the time, all the romance of the idea was gone.
I’ve found that true for marriage and parenting, individually, as well. It’s nice and fuzzy to go to a 60th Anniversary party and listen to an old man weep just saying his wife’s name, or to attend a wedding or graduation ceremony and hear parents beam with love and good memories of their kids. But I would like, for the sake of balance, to hear a little more about the unyielding tidal wave of screaming and crying and sweating, of feces and stomach bile, of blood and guts and gripping fear that is raising children and building a healthy marriage. It’s hard, hard work that only stops for the few, precious moments everyone but you is asleep. The rewarding moments are not one inch short of transcendent, but, goodness grief! can it be a beating sometimes.
My saint of a wife has had to do a lot without my help this last year. In Heaven, she will be living in the Mansion, and I will be bunking in the tool shed behind the servants’ quarters for sure, and without a word of complaint. (Do forgive the theological holes in my metaphor.)
However, while I didn’t abide this year with the gushy romance you read about, I am grateful to have had the chance to suffer a little for the people I love. And I say “a little” because I know many, many people suffer a lot more for a lot longer in the name of serving their family. This was just my temporary taste of stretching a little farther than usual. It was also a good bit of perspective. At a time when a few of our customers and many in our country were (and still are) loosing their jobs, I had two, one of which I did from the comfort of my own home, the other of which offered me excellent benefits and a free pound of coffee every week.
Creative Findings
It also taught me about when my mind is the sharpest: the vulgar hours between five and eight am. If you’ve found any of my jokes funny in the last year, chances are I wrote them at about 5:15am after making a guy named Kory a quad Venti latte. Then I would repeat that joke to myself and my coworkers until around 6:30am, when I got my ten-minute break and could write it down properly. Sometimes, when it was really hot, I snuck out my little notebook and scribbled it out, one word at a time under the espresso machine between making drinks. None of what I wrote was award-winning, but I think it helped me move a little farther down the line to improvement.
Most of those ended up on Twitter because taking the time to shoot, edit and produce a comic strip for LOLZIES!!1@! was impossible most weeks. Hopefully that will explain the irregularity of my updates over there.
On the Siren
A quick word about Starbucks. 90% of my experience working any kind of retail has been a soul-sucking nightmare. Shlepping plastic crap and poisonous food to over-picky, entitled clods is every bit as bad as it sounds. So I was braced for the worst when I went back to it. But, I didn’t have even one of the typically horrible retail experiences I remembered. If a drink was wrong, people were always cool about it and waited pretty patiently while I remade it. I worked with, and served, a classy, funny, sweet group of people whom I will miss seeing on such a regular basis. Several of our regulars were such happy beams of light, they often turned a rotten morning into a great one. And every time I had to call in to our corporate hotline regarding benefits or my leave of absence when the baby was born, I was never on the phone for more than 10 minutes from the time I dialed, to the time my issue was resolved. And the people with whom I spoke were just as sweet and classy as the ones I steamed milk with every day.
I know Starbucks has their critics, and I have one or two criticisms myself after working there, but in light of so many more positive things from my experience, my specific criticisms, in this forum at least, don’t bear mentioning. If I ever need a second job again for some reason, they will be the first place I consider.
Thanks for reading this. And sorry if I was cranky to you last year.
