Back in the Glory Days

My family likes to talk about, "back in the glory days," but you have to imagine it being said in an old-man voice, like, "baaack in the GLORY days, when I was a young whipper snapper..." It started because my dad, a middle school track coach, kept bringing up stories of particularly amazing athletes he'd coached back in the day.

If I had to define a period as my glory days, I'd peg the years immediately following college as among the most memorable. I was working in customer service for a small start-up "hippie" coffee company in Seattle. One of the perks of the job was drinking as much coffee as I wanted all day long. Sometimes we had new product sample time in the afternoon, which meant I spent the night overly caffeinated and staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep.

More that just the buzz of beans, though, was the rush I got from feeling like I was doing something that mattered. Our products were Fair Trade, Organic, and Shade Grown, so I felt like I wasn't exploiting anyone. The company was set up in a sort of Newman's Own model whereby profits were generated to fund programs for at-risk children in coffee-growing countries. When I got out of bed in the morning, I was firmly convinced of the rightness of our cause and motivated to do my best at work. (As an aside, the business model didn't actually work all that great, in part, because the specialty coffee industry is a highly competitive marketplace, but I didn't really understand that at the time.)

Our office was in a warehouse in Seattle's SoDo neighborhood, literally one block away from Starbucks headquarters. (I called them the "evil empire" yet often walked across the street to enjoy lunch in their cafeteria without a hint of irony.) We built cubicles for ourselves out of old wooden pallets covered with brightly painted corrugated tin. Our building was quite close to the railroad tracks, so our cube walls rattled noisily whenever a train rolled by. Burlap coffee sacks also served a major role in our decor, as did pennants of all the colleges who signed up as customers.

As a young idealist, I found our staff meetings particularly inspiring. They were a great blend of humor and motivation, the latter being doled out by the company's president who really had a vision for what we were trying to do. I was the youngest employee and perhaps particularly predisposed to be fired up, since I'd just returned from studying abroad in Central America the semester before I started working there.

Outside of work hours, most of the employees enjoyed socializing together as well, hitting up local happy hours frequently. My coworkers introduced me to the culinary delights of Salty's and Ray's, and the joy of drinking good beer and wine in general. In the summer, our boss took us all to his cabin up on an island in the Puget Sound for a weekend-long retreat that can best be described as awesome.

The nice thing about glory days is that you mainly remember the good times. Sure, if I try, I can think of a couple negatives from that time period, but by and large I have rosy memories. I'm glad I enjoyed myself then since I didn't really know I was living in my glory days until after they were over.

File under: NaBloPoMo Day 13