I Work With People

Morning Coffee

Every morning you wake up (If you’re lucky). Every morning you get dressed and head to work (If you are lucky). Half way to work you stop and grab your morning coffee. Then you head back to work. When you get to work after the commute, you sit at your desk and start your day sipping your coffee reading your emails and reminding yourself what project you left off  with yesterday.

If your lucky.

What really happens.

Alarm goes off, you get up hit the snooze and crawl back in bed. Finally you get up head to the shower. Drop the soap. Drop the soap again this time it’s outside the tub. Now the soap is covered in hair. You get out of the shower. Walk to your room, cat screams at you for treats. Pudgy fricken cat. You do the dance of ninjas to prevent cat hair on your clean pants. All the while listening to it scream for treats. You toss treats in the cat’s bowl so it does not follow you out as you leave. Get in your car and scoot to the stop sign only to turn the corner and sit at the world’s least fair red-light. Pull out on the street who’s speed limit changes from 35 to 45 and back down to 35 over and over in  a 6 mile stretch. The stretch with more cops on it than any 10 streets in the area.  Yep the guy in front of you has his cruise control set at 40. You can’t pass him in the 45 zone, because he will just pass you at the next 35 zone only to have you pass him again.

You make it to the coffee shop parking lot. Every self righteous jerk in town is there waiting for the perfect parking spot. Does not matter what spot you want. They all want it. You park at the place next door to avoid an aggravated door ding from the dork who had to unwillingly park one space over from the perfect spot. You walk to door. You notice the door race. What I mean by the door race is, well there are two races. There is the “me first” race and there is the ” Oh My god that door weighs 90000 lbs I will get there in time for you to hold the door for me then I will be first in line” race. So here you stand in line behind the old lady you held the door for. She is counting her pennies and telling stories of when she used to be a teacher to the “Barista” and making sure the guy/gal listens instead of making the coffee like they need to be. ” Oh honey you just need to relaxe, the coffee will be made the people will drink it and everything will be ok, life’s to short to stress over coffee”. You order your coffee . You get your coffee. It took less than 20 seconds. YEAH! You make your way to the cream depot and there is a fricken mosh pit. The old lady ex teacher is there at the front with her 50 gallon purse taking up one side of the table. She finally is done with her mix. Oops she dribbled a bit on the counter. 3 minutes go by as she is cleaning up a droplet and small grain of sugar. You chunk cream in your cup walk out stirring the coffee with the lid in your mouth.

You need to take a right out of the parking lot. Not one single car on the road to stop you from taking a right. Well of course except for the teacher granny. She is taking a left and she is waiting for the car on the right that is 1/4 mile away. Finally she is gone but someone opened up and let the cows out. You are not getting out on that road because your lane is now full of traffic. And there is some p%^$#k behind you letting into his horn.

Right you are on the road now. Doing speed limit fine. You notice you are approaching a little white car who might be doing less than the speed limit. You go to pass him and now it’s a race. You find yourself doing 15 over the speed limit. So you slow down. The clown is now slowing down with you. You look over and see it’s a woman putting on makeup. She apparently is using you to judge her speed while she does this. If she stays next to you she should be fine… Right?  She sooo could poke her eye out like that. So you hit your brakes a little hard to make her hit hers. You then gun it and cruise on down the road.

Red lights are not in your favor today. Every slow freak on the road who is in the other lane, sees that you are far back enough that they can jump in your lane and be the first at the red light. Only to do 10 under the speed limit. Totally cancels out anything that person thought they were achieving by being first off the light. You look down while at the light, and see that your coffee cup lid sucks and you have a bit of coffee on your console.Yep you used the last of the napkins last time this happened. You have nothing but a hat you don’t wear.

Park your car and walk to the door. And here we are again with the local door races again. You stop, step aside, and let everyone pile into the building while you sit there and finally get a sip of your coffee. You walk toward the elevator only to see all of the people you let go first, hitting the close button on the elevator. You wait 4 seconds because you didn’t want to ride with those selfish freaks anyway. Now here comes the new herd of office buffalo wanting to ride your button mashing skills. That’s cool, The hot chick from the second floor is in this mesh of people. Of course she stands no where near you on the elevator though. And she is on her cell phone with her kid? or moron boytoy…. Who knows….. but they do not seem to have a job, since they are talking about finding the tv remote and what time wheel of fortune comes on.

You make it to your desk and hit the start button on your pc and click on your monitor. You are relieved to be at work. You sip your coffee and drip a tad on your new white shirt. You get an email that says you have about 20 minutes to be at a meeting upstairs. You are short noticed that you will be giving the presentation. and all you can think about is that stupid brown dot on your shirt.

You open your email again and the server times out. Clearly someone sent you a honking massive file. You leave the email open and let it do it’s thing while you head off to the meeting. That all goes as suspected. You talked a lot about your new brown dot. Make it to your desk and see that someone from the office sent you some video they thought was funny. Hence the massive server issue and the timing out of the email. For the life of you, you can not remember what it was you had been working on the day before. The continuous  pop ins to the office of passerby people who have their words of wit (typically some weird statement while making a gun shape with their fingers [I don't care what the boss says, I think you're alright] or some other phrase that if you haven’t heard a million times by now, you just got out of a coma.) , really makes the task of remembering a bit harder. Bing lunch time.

You walk next door to the sandwich shop. Again the races are on. and get your favorite stale bread sandwich and suddenly you remember that what you were working on was your speech for today’s 6am meeting, that you already had. and winged it.

You get upstairs to your desk eat your sandwich while the office coffee machine is brewing it’s black ink that you prepared. Finish your sandwich to walk over there and turn on a new batch of coffee, since everyone chugged the other batch you just made. This time you wait in there. While waiting some dill hole comes in and starts a conversation with you while holding the handle of the coffee pot waiting for it to dispense enough coffee into the pot for him to pour the strongest part of the batch into his cup. You try to explain to the guy that he will be assuring that the rest of the coffee will now be weak, but he either doesn’t get it, or he doesn’t care. I assume we can call him carelessly stupid. Of course his hand is still on the coffee pot handle.

Now you are next door getting coffee from the sandwich shop.

You have made it back up stairs 15 minutes late back from lunch. You sit at your desk and get a page to help someone with their computer. You make it back to your desk and feel like you have forgotten something. Where is your coffee? Ok trek back to the chubby chick’s office and get your coffee. Nope. she trashed it. because she didn’t know who’s it could be.

Start another pot of coffee, run to your desk and print out your latest experiment you want to show the boss, while the coffee brews. Get to the printer only to find that one of the people in collections saw what you had printed and was so confused by it  they thought it was a joke so they crumpled it up and threw it in the trash.

Grab coffee cup and rinse it and pour yourself some charred greasy ink blotted coffee that is so greasy it has a rainbow in it, into your cup. Y0u thought you would outsmart the dude who likes his coffee strong by making it way strong, so that the rest of the coffee won’t be so weak. He seems to not be in the office right now.

Now everyone is upset because the coffee stinks and tastes bad.

You get in the elevator, get in your car, get in traffic wishing the car would finally cool off, you get home and can’t understand why you are so tired .

You have had a day that turned into a coffee quest. When actually the coffee was to be a perk in the first place.