ANXIETY HELL

Because I’ve been so busy attempting to finish my book lately (and by that I mean going to hot yoga then dragging my sweaty ass home to sleep all day) I’ve had less time to work on the blogs. Really, though? I’ve been trying.

Realizing that I’ve been lagging more than usual, I decided there was only one thing to do. No, it wasn’t to stop lagging, but to try to uncover why I’m lagging. So I went to the library and checked out Living Without Procrastination and It’s About Time: The 6 Styles of Procrastination and How to Overcome Them.

Even I can see that this is pretty much me hitting rock bottom: Reading about procrastination to further delay getting any work done? The irony is not lost on me.

I would have set them down, I would have stopped this latest idiotic distraction, if only the first pages of each book had said, “Put down this book and get back to work, dumbass.”

But alas, they did not. I had to keep reading.

Turns out I’m equal parts Worrier Procrastinator and Dreamer Procrastinator. Big shock there. Also not so shocking is that these books have been a complete waste of time that involved taking a lot of quizzes and reading startling profiles that encapsulate my exact personality. (It’s kind of scary, like Miss Cleo wrote these books! How do they know? How do they know so much about me?!) So far I haven’t read a single solution for getting better, but in the name of sticking to the task, I shall plow ahead and finish these books.

In the meantime, I decided to post a story I wrote a while back. Many of you may have already read it, but perhaps my newer readers whom I might have lost if I didn’t post something here again soon, will get something out of it. Even if it is just that too much Botox is a horrifying thing. To those of you who have stayed with me, checking back now and then only to find more evidence of my procrastination, I thank you for not giving up on the site, and I promise I will post regularly soon.

The Starbucks Story (A.K.A. “Confessions of an Ex-Barista”)

We were busier than a Botox syringe at a Newport Beach birthday party and as I bent down to pry up the milk and dirt-caked mat – a duty that so greatly contributed to my dignity – I overheard the construction workers in line make me some offers I could refuse.  It was laundry day and I had made the ill-fated decision to come to work in my only clean black pants that fit me like old pants fit the “after” guy in a diet pill infomercial.  Apparently I was selling crack of the plumber variety and Hank and Frank were jonesing for a fix.  As if things weren’t relaxing enough, I now had the added stress of working under the unfavorable conditions wherein one must pretend they did not just receive a visual cavity search by strangers who neither had the credentials nor suspicion to conduct such an investigation.

 

I attempted to appear casual as I mopped the floor with one hand and locked the other in a death-grip on the waistband of my pants. My delusional reverie that I was maintaining the picture of cool was quickly shattered when I caught sight of Wendy laughing at me.  She turned back to the gentlemen in line and slammed their coffee and change down with a scowl before yelling, “Next!” 

 

Wendy was my second favorite coworker, runner up only to my Star Wars-loving friend, Ryan, whose humor enabled me to put up with the endless pain and humiliation that was Starbucks.  Wendy’s hair was as bright and flaming as her temper when the customers pounced on me with their random unprovoked verbal attacks.  She was a trained toe dancer who had recently earned her bachelors in dance.  All of us had earned our degrees or were at least half way done with college.  However, the fact that inside our heads were brains was a notion that was completely lost on the well-bred rich folk of Newport Beach who treated us with the utleast respect.

 

The women of Newport were the worst.  They continually insisted on parking their decked out Mercedes in the handicapped spots; perhaps out of fear of stopping the infinite bad karma they had worked a lifetime to compile.  After a minute or so of in depth detective work to discover, that in fact, “PULL” does not mean “PUSH,” they would enter in all of their plastic surgery glory. 

One could not accurately describe their sullen pouts as bee stung.  Their lips more correctly could be described as violently attacked by a nest of angry hornets.  I wondered once, how does a mother entertain her baby when she is always in a state of perpetual fish lips.  What sort of fun face is there besides the fishy lips face that was obviously not hilarious to a child who has been so overly exposed?  But then I remembered, of course, that spending time with the future brats of Newport was a job reserved strictly for underpaid nannies who lacked green cards.  These women would watch us with hawk eyes (actually they were more alien than hawk as lifting your forehead off and reattaching it to the back of your head will have that effect) making sure that we didn’t poison them with extra calories.

 

It was never a secret what their drink would be: nonfat, sugar free vanilla, four Equal, no foam, decaf lattes.  Nonfat because vomiting whole milk in the bathroom was a task better saved for after dinner.  Sugar free because one can only get so much liposuction.  Four Equal simply for the power it gave them to force us to stand there opening and dumping the tiny packets for them instead of doing it themselves at the condiment bar like normal human beings.  (To be honest, though, there were some days when I enjoyed dumping the carcinogen dust into their drinks.)  No foam because God forbid they get a gas bubble that could interfere with their strenuous days of shopping and torturing retail and food service workers.  Decaf, well the decaf was because we added that part.  These ladies needed caffeine in their coked-up systems like they needed more prescription drugs.  Sometimes executive decisions must be made in order to make the world a better place.  I’m quite sure the girls at Bloomingdale’s would thank me.

 

The men were not much better.  Also unaware of the concept of other people, they thoroughly took advantage of beating the elderly and handicapped to the open blue spot.  They would skid their Ferraris and Hummers (because we all know how a real man needs to drive himself to his white collar job on a city street in a gas guzzling military vehicle) into position and immediately get on their cell phones. 

The joy I felt when I got a male finger pushed in front of my face so that I would not dare keep the line moving by taking their order and interrupting their important phone call, was really just indescribable.  I once had a guy scoff at me after I had patiently waited for him to get off the phone and then inform me, “I wasn’t going to be rude to him!” 

 

Ah, the men.  If they weren’t trying to impress you by showing you their paperwork for their yachts and then failing to leave a tip, they were screaming at you for some reason or another.  But really all I could hear was, “Blah-blah-blah!  Give me decaf.”  One man in particular had a rudeness that surpassed the efforts of all others.  His was a personality normally reserved for a man who goes by Lucifer, Satan if you will.  One day he offered up such a scathing personal assault on me and my eyebrows that I really thought I might give him reason to park in the handicapped space. 

 

I don’t have what one might call an overabundance of eyebrows.  On the contrary, in fact, due to my unfortunate mishap with a Lady Bic razor in Jr. High.  Ever so inspired by the likes of Marilyn Monroe and other such thin eye browed goddesses of her time, I decided on a genius plan to bypass the excruciating pain of plucking my eyebrows while also saving time.  As I stared back at the Martian-like face in the mirror it occurred to me that while I now had Marilyn’s lack of brow hair, what I did not have was a bevy of professional makeup artists ready and waiting to draw them on in that glamorous arching shape that would prove to be quite difficult to emulate.  While I would eventually learn to pencil them in, I would also learn their fate: They would never grow back. 

 

As one might imagine, being eyebrow-challenged is a sensitive subject, like baldness or amputated limbs.  It is not something you expect to hear about from a customer you have served with a sweetness that could cause diabetes for nearly a year.  A customer who you have gone above and beyond for, by breaking store policy and stirring his drink for him with a straw when so requested.  A customer whose own lack of hair in desired places and surplus of accumulated growth in the ear and nasal regions would lead one to feel deceivingly safe from insults.  Such a surprise attack from the South left me lying speechless on the battleground, living a life of regret.  Sitting, staring, going over the strategy that could have brought victory if only the soldier had seen it coming.

 

In front of a good sized audience of my coworkers and other regular customers The Dark Father decided it was an opportune moment to inform me that, “You should take a look at Carly’s eyebrows.”  My heart stopped.  I stood frozen, hoping this was because she had some strange apparatus stuck to them that I could help remove.  Of course not.  “See how natural they look?” Oh God.  People please keep moving.  There’s nothing to see here. “You should really grow yours out and make them look like hers.  Why do yours look so round?  Why do you make them arched like that?” he continued with what I assumed were rhetorical questions.  “It doesn’t look good.”

 

Was this some sort of hallucination?  Can more than one person truly exist who sees nothing wrong with entering someone’s workplace and launching an all out firing squad of insults on someone’s personal attributes that have nothing to do with their job performance?  I really thought that after the decrepit woman (who was merely a walking anti-smoking campaign, her raspy dried up vocal chords and wrinkles a serious threat to Phillip Morris’s sales) made a scene about my soft girly voice and how horrible it was, well I thought lightening couldn’t strike twice. 

 

And then as soon as it had started it was over and he was gone.  Once I had picked my jaw up off the ground, I became aware of my coworkers and regulars trying to make me feel better.  But it was as if I couldn’t hear them.  I was standing in the movie of my life pressing rewind and pause and then play.  When I pressed play the speeches came.  Instantly – luckily for my employment history an instant too late – they came.  Long eloquent come backs straight from a screenplay.  A monologue that would earn the actor playing me an Oscar. 

 

“You don’t know me!  You don’t know anything about why I do or do not have less hair on my brows than other people, anymore than I know why your head is a useless, bald and shiny reflective light source.  And I’ll tell you something else I don’t know, and that is why you would be under the impression that it is appropriate to enter a person’s place of work and give your loud and unwarranted opinion about the nature of their physical being!  Especially when that person has never done anything but be kind to you and serve you!  So you can take your stupid drink, which is nothing more than a transparent excuse for you to get up and leave the house once a day, and you can get the hell out of my store!  I suggest you go take a long hard look in the mirror and place your judgments where they belong!”  Actor throws steaming coffee urn at the wall for effect.

 

The balance between rudely-inappropriate and overly-interested-inappropriate existed on a constantly changing scale.  One day while working on the Verisimo, a fine new machine that saved many a barista from carpel tunnel syndrome by pulling the espresso shots automatically, the overly-interested-inappropriateness reached a new level.  My husband had come in to take me to lunch just as a teenage boy who was over the legal limit of hormone capacity came in with plans of his own for me.  The kid slapped down a wad of cash on the counter and informed Ryan that he would have…me.  Unfortunately for him my price is way more than that of a Frapacino.  I’m at least a Mc Donald’s value meal.  I mean, come on, how insulting.  Also unfortunate for the kid was the fact that the angry tall guy standing behind him was my husband. 

 

I had not heard any of this enlightening transaction over the whir of the Verisimo.  All I knew was that my husband seemed to be yelling at some petrified kid, behavior that struck me as odd since I knew my husband had already had his afternoon coffee.  The poor kid hopefully learned that women are not sex objects to be bought and sold, or at least learned the importance of bladder control in public places.

 

Another young man who misunderstood the basic tenants of retail transactions was The Tip Stealer. Yes, as one might imagine, The Tip Stealer was a man who proved that you don’t have to be rich to be a complete bastard.  Earning tips in a Newport Beach Starbucks is about as easy as Ron Jeremy getting his virginity back.  So when the rare Botox-injected soul relinquished some change from her $8,000 Louis Vuitton purse we were all quite grateful that we would now be able to finish putting ourselves through college.  And since the Oz-like, man-behind-the-curtain, C.E.O. of this trillion dollar company was too busy with his intergalactic takeover to notice that his employees were living in poverty, our tips were greatly appreciated. 

 

The Tip Stealer was a vagrant in his mid twenties with a gorgeous head of nappy blond almost-dreadlocks.  He had the kind of hair that serves the dual purpose of warming the head and back while providing a home to extended families of bugs.  There was an air about him like the warm sun on a dumpster full of decaying meat and cabbage.  He wore a blue and yellow children’s backpack, also probably an unjustifiable gift to himself.  He would order water and while the unsuspecting worker filled a cup he would dump our tip buckets into his bag and make a stumbling, wheezing, jingling getaway. 

 

Through a terrible lapse in judgment on the part of our lovable manager, who was about as flamboyant as Elton John tarred and glittered, starring as the flames in a Broadway production of Fahrenheit 451, another enemy was allowed to infiltrate the Newport Starbucks division.  We shall call her Cracky as she was a real life crack head.  She was probably the Queen of all Crackheads having inherited the throne from generations before her.  Her crazy, darting, frantic eyes bounced from wall to wall like her skinny scratched up body.  To feel sorry for her is to never have worked with her.  People on large quantities of amphetamines love to do two things: ramble incessantly and clean. 

 

One night while sharing a shift with me, Cracky decided to strip the store completely apart and scour, with a toothbrush, everything needed to operate the business.  At first she was able to focus on one appliance at a time so I was able to work around her.  However, after her third trip to the bathroom in about an hour and a half, she returned with her hair sticking up all over and a renewed zest for cleanliness.  I had turned up the reggae CD to drown out her desultory diatribe on hamsters while simultaneously succeeding at pissing off the creepy jerk in the corner on his laptop.  All of a sudden we were inundated with the Friday night rush. 

 

I began ringing people up and setting the drinks on the counter.  Only I noticed that the cups were piling up and Cracky was no where in sight.  I dashed to the back room, hurdling over the mop bucket and nearly died a very unglamorous death in front of angry and impatient caffeine addicts.  I called out her name with the panic and vigor of someone who was about to be attacked by a livid mob if they didn’t get some help.  A delivery guy in the back room informed me that he saw a small hyper girl go out back with a sponge and a trash can.  I had no time to search.  I had to pull double duty. 

 

I sprinted back out like John Bobbitt after seeing a shiny pair of scissors and frantically took over.  I tried to make Frappuccinos but the tops to the blenders were missing.  I moved on to mochas but the chocolate pitcher was coated in cleaner and slipped to the floor.  It landed with a crash and splashed liquid chocolate everywhere.  My hair was now truly the rich cocoa shade the bottle of hair dye had promised and my feet made squishing sounds as I trudged back to the register with my shoes full of syrup.  For the third time, I was crying at work.  And for the eight billionth time I knew I had to finish college.

 

After I had given notice and my last day approached, I struggled to find a sense of nostalgia for this chapter in my life that was closing.  I tried to convince myself I would miss this time without the serious responsibilities of adulthood.  I longed to feel something for the customers besides the Buddhist ideal I’d come to adopt that they were teaching me patience.  But it was clear to me as I threw my head back in laughter at the robot dance Ryan, Wendy and I had just completed, that the only thing I would miss would be my fellow baristas. 

 

Those wonderful, caring friends, who had touched my life, knew what it felt like to grin and bear it, to smile in the face of insults while praying for a tip. Like anyone who has ever struggled through a low-paying customer service job, they shared that constant state of ambivalence that quickly becomes all too familiar. Should I hang in there just a little while longer or should I throw down my coffee-drenched apron and never look back? Do I dutifully adhere to the age-old dictum that the customer is always right after the customer has just informed me that I can suck it (Why, you’re correct, kind sir, I can suck it!) or should I leap across the counter and pour a steaming cappuccino down said customer’s cranium? These were the questions we helped each other answer.

 

A part of me feared that when I went back to school and we were no longer scheduled to be together we would lose touch.  But an even greater part of me feared that we wouldn’t lose touch at all, that after graduation – even with my hard-earned degree in hand – I’d have no other viable employment opportunities and would find myself back behind the counter. While I was lucky enough to find work at a dot com after college, I’ve yet to be able to silence that inkling voice that always reminds me, we’re all just a step away from working in food service. And maybe that voice is not such a bad thing.