by
When I was 8 YEARS OLD, I wanted to play second base for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
By my 17th birthday, I dreamt of writing books and creating characters as cool as Holden Caufield.
(PAUSE)
By the time I was twenty-four, I HAD finally found a job. The manager of a coffee shop in Phoenix liked my resume. So he put me behind the bar in the city's busiest drive thru where I learned to make a triple-nonfat-TWO-Splenda-no foam-extra hot-caramel macchiato almost before you could get the words out of your mouth.
AND I hated every chocolate-pumping second of that job.
Here's the thing about drive thrus, especially busy ones. And I hope you remember this the next time you're waiting in line and pounding your steering wheel at 6 am while some poor sap is sweating at the register.
Those of us behind that crummy window can see everything. And we can hear!
As soon as you roll up and that little ding goes off in the headset, we can hear your boyfriend scrounging for change in the console. We can hear you sighing when the line of cars is stretched all the way out to 16th Street. We know your plans for the weekend. We know if you'll tip OR NOT even before we see your smiling face.
And while I'm listening to you complain about the temperature of your ICED beverage, I'm contending with problems of my own-- like unfriendly and unpleasant teenaged coworkers.
I once dropped a sleeve of 500 plastic lids into a pool of curdled milk and coffee grounds. As I hunched over the mess to clean it up, my 15-year-old counterpart exploded in laughter.
He said, "Nice going, Georgetown! "
My boss must have told him where I had gone to school, and the nickname…Georgetown….stuck…with a few too many people in my opinion.
Every time I mistook a mocha for a macchiato or squeezed out a pile of pumpkin sauce on the counter by mistake, they let me hear about it.
(PAUSE)
And at the end of the day, there was no pride in the job, no satisfaction. A major-league infielder can look back on the outs he made or the pitches he hit. An author can re-read the day's writing with a sense of accomplishment. But I'd go home at night and tear the chocolate out of my hair….and wash the coffee smell from my arms.
Sometimes, I would look in the mirror and do everything I could to hold back tears.
I lasted 4 months. I worked my last shift not long after my manager clipped an egg timer onto my shirt pocket before I went on break.
Now I'm about to turn 26 and just two years later I see value to that stage in our lives when we're lost and desperate, full of ambition and short on perspective.
I used to think that my life experiences were unique.
But life has been done before…by a million other generations who hated their jobs or felt the fear of mediocrity.
I guess I never would have know that without those Sunday morning and the espresso machine growling in my ear.
Peter O'Dowd will Graduate from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in May, when he will once again face uncertain employment.