Hey, I still exist.

Okay, so it turns out I suck at this blogging thing.  Not that anyone who has known me for a while should have expected anything better; this is the third blog that I’ve started and then meandered around.

To be fair, the last few months have been a huge adjustment.  Borders closed.  I lost my job.  And then two days later, I started another job.  I wish I had taken a little more time in between jobs, but I won’t begrudge my good fortune.  I’m now a supervisor at Starbucks, making about the same amount of money as I was at Borders (actually more with tips, if I’m being honest).  And yet the job is so much less difficult.

Still, it’s taken some time to get used to it.  I’ve worked in a café before, so that part of it is fine.  It’s the schedule.  Since I started with Starbucks, I’ve done nothing but open, with one or two later shifts.  They call those later shifts the “third opener.”  Third opener starts at 6:45 a.m. 

Six forty-five.  As the third opener.  Think about it.

Most of the time, though, my alarm goes off at 3:40.  At least three times a week, I have to be at work at 5 a.m.  Suddenly, I’m tired all the time.  I take naps.  I’ve never in thirty years on this earth been able to take a nap, and now it’s all Andrew can do to get me off the couch and into the bed before I can’t move anymore.

It’s really weird, though; when Andrew is off, we get to have entire afternoons together.  I work a full shift before he even eats lunch.  We’ve never had so much time to spend with one another.  He’s actually turning into me, the one who’s annoyed that he never gets time to himself.  So we usually get to spend some time together in the afternoon, and then I crash around 4 and he wakes me up to cook dinner.  Days have so many more hours in them when you wake up in the no-questions-about-it middle of the night.

I’ve realized that this weird thing happened when Borders closed:  I disassociated.  I used to care, and we’re talking A LOT, about customers.  About making all those people who were grouchy or rude or just unpleasant happy.  Turns out, liquidation took that away from me.  This is not to say that I’m a bad supervisor, or that I give bad customer service.  It just means that I’m so much more zen.  Who would have thought that I, Jamie Quinney Thomas, would ever become zen?  I’m able to realize how petty everything is after going through the process of closing a store.  Part of me wonders if I would feel this way if I had gone into a business other than coffee, but to be honest now when someone bitches at me about us being out of dark roast and it taking two extra minutes to brew, I just want to give them a raised eyebrow and say, “Seriously?  I drink coffee.  And coffee?  Isn’t worth that kind of melodrama.”

I think that honestly this is a better way to respond to customer adversity.  It’s healthier.  I go in, I brew some coffee, I manage some people and count some money and order some stuff like I used to at Borders.  I miss checking out books and I miss knowing what’s coming out every week (losing a bookstore job has led to me subscribing to both the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly on top of the scads of other magazines we already get), but the job is so much less stressful. 

The only thing that really bothers me is the people.  I don’t want to sell my new coworkers short.  It’s just that I knew within a month of knowing most of the people I worked with at Borders if we would be friends for the long term, and after a month of Starbucks I don’t even see myself friending any of these people on Facebook. [UPDATE: I have successfully friended three Starbucks people.  And turns out, I dig 'em.  So there's that.]  Since Borders closed, I’ve realized how strong my relationships were with a lot of people there.  We see each other almost as often as we did when we worked together, though now we have to pay to hang out instead of getting paid to do it.  I miss having those kinds of work relationships.

I’m hoping that I’ll get back into the things that make me me soon.  I haven’t read a book in a while (though to be fair I’ve read a lot of magazines and newspapers).  I realized how much I depended on the train commute for reading time; now I walk to work (which is, of course, a blessing).  I finally got back to writing the last week or so after a good six months of a complete and utter block, and I’m hoping that train will continue. 

So maybe the next post will be about resuming the plan.  The debt issue is definitely starting to resolve itself; the reading conundrum I’m going to try to solve soon; the writing enigma is coming together.  But for now, I’m going to go to bed.  Because five a.m. comes really, really early, no matter what time I pack it in for the night.