After the bucks today I had to call home to hear a friendly voice. It is a weird thing being the coffee sopper for an area. I do love it at times. the energy gets up and you start feeling like a supafreak after a minute. It is like being high off kung fu, and your movements are sure and trained and wack/wack/pack, and it is like the Matrix, and people are getting their buzz on that will spin them through the day, and people who work there are usually good conversation, you feel apart of the community… and then sometimes it sucks.
Mainly the attitude, it becomes a tight nit group at a store, you sometimes see them more than your family, and so you get into everyone's business, and so the kid gloves come off pretty quickly and everyone gets really comfortable around each other. This is good but it can also be a drama fest, the air can get toxic at times. Like being trapped in a submarine crashed at the bottom of the ocean. In those times it is all about get through the shift and tune out the madness. It is actually a good training ground for staying cool (or at least acting like you are) when everyone is losing their minds.
I really do enjoy the bucks, people get punchy when it is short staffed and you've been cranking for four hours and you feel like you've been sneezed on the whole time. Sometimes you leave a shift the consistency of a used paper towel, a psychic Kleenex.
But then at cube job, nothing like that at all, it is all abstract and removed, like working in the engine room of the Enterprise, one of those guys watching the blinking lights all day. Occasionally a red alert goes off and people start scrambling and you start hitting those blinking buttons faster, somewhere someone is being attacked by a Klingon, but you never see it, it is all abstract, and then the alarm goes silent and you go back to monitoring the random flows of data that mean something to somebody whom you will never lay eyes on.
For some people who are on the Enterprise it must go like this.
they - So what did you do after academy
he - Oh I was on the Enterprise
they - Wow! really! that must have been awesome!
he - I suppose.
they - What?
he - Ya know, it was alright I guess.
they - Well… did you meet James T Kirk
he - No, never saw him. He would say he'd come down to inspect the department I was in, but he would never show.
they - Oh. But I guess you saw a lot of action, space battles and what not.
he - Yeah, but ya know, a red light on the wall starts flashing, and then after a minute it stops, and then someone on the intercom says how we just destroyed a Klingon war cruiser, and then they'd email us a credit for a free ice cream in the galley.
they - Oh.
he - Yeah, and warp drive made me nauseous.
they - …
he - I'm in sales now.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't be a total belligerent pig of defiance to the whole "slipping into oblivion" thing. Clutch and dig in. Lock jaw into it. Boa constrictor it. Still slips through like liquid, it will not be denied, but you got to do it anyway, otherwise your spine goes, your taste for blood goes, it all becomes cold oat mill. A loosing fight, no prolonging the moment, but there is a saint for lost causes, no saint for cockroaches.
If we're all in agreement, then someone is getting away with something. You should get in their way, just because if they get a foothold, they'll start bending things. Antagonism and defiance keep it all in check. I respectfully disagree with everything you say just on general principle. Nobody deserves to ride for free.
sd