When last I wrote I wrote from the heart of the British Empire in the intellectual city of Cambridge as I visited my friends. As I returned home to Denver; healthy, refreshed, and renewed to the arms of my Angie I was in for an interesting month.
To begin with, my tenure at my apartment came to an unofficial close as pretty much every night I stayed over at Angie’s place. In February we’d talked about her coming along on the walk in May but neither of us took it that seriously until the second and third weeks of March when we went on a buying spree and bought our first home together. A pleasant two person three/four season tent which we set up immediately on my living room floor. We also got her a backpack, boots, new bed rolls, and all sorts of necessities including sleeping bags that zip together to look like you’re sleeping in the mouth of Great Cthulu. All of this put the idea of her coming along directly into reality and since then we’ve been unable to tear ourselves away from maps and plotting and planning.
All of this made for a giddy month until the axe dropped on my employment situation. When I applied for my job back in September I applied to a coffee shop that is the centralized hub of a neighborhood community which is what I liked about it. On the morning of March 19th I was greeted by a cop at the door and told the franchise owner was getting the boot and corporate was taking it back. At first I was delighted because the franchise owner was an incompetent ass. He hadn’t paid a bill in several months, and some of them a year or two, and some of us employees’ checks would bounce. Mine bounced in the beginning of December just in time for rent. Thanks boss. Anyway, so thus was my joy that the coffee shop would actually have a supply of coffee again and payday wouldn’t be a time of anxiety, but my joy was soon lost.
Along with my joy were two days of work as corporate reorganized the shop, threw out and restocked everything, and fired and rehired us all to work for them instead of the franchise company. All that was doable until they stayed the first day we opened and set us to work on completely new equipment they didn’t train us how to use and watched us all like hawks. Suddenly uniforms had to be worn properly, my little messes at the espresso machine were now completely unacceptable and I was banned from the machine, and we could no longer drink coffee without paying for it under the new rules. The new computerized register was a nightmare and all of us spent about five minutes every time someone ordered something new because we didn’t know which category, subcategory, and in some cases new name to look for it under. Much of the staff put in their quit notices and among them was me.
I was to leave the last day of March with the plan to go and work for my former manager who had left the franchise a month before the fiasco to start her own shop, the Wash Park Perk and Pub. She had pretty much single handedly kept our shop alive with all the unpaid bills through great finesse and shrewd business sense. She’s a fun gal as well and figured I’d rather support her for my last month getting less money than work for a corporate coffee chain with sanitized rules and regulations under the leering eye of Big Brother. So of eleven of us one left immediately, five put in our notice to do one or two more weeks, and the remaining lot either sucked it up or spoke of making other plans. Three days before my final date, March 31, I was listening to my manager struggle out a schedule and hearing some others moan about sixty hour weeks because of the great losses. I couldn’t do it, I yelled back to them I’d stay if they needed me and of course they did. Another friend of mine, Angelina, stayed as well to help ease the load in the transition despite our disdain for the new regime. And thus the thirty first came, and thus I stayed with the sinking ship.
Such was work, and the strains of leaving soon, work, and various other issues weighed on Angie and I so we did what we do when stressed…we gambled. In the heart of the corporate muck we decided to take the free bus to Black Hawk and unwind a tad taking a walk in the mountains for fresh air. We walked to Central City and back then had to go visit Fitzgerald’s for some free hot dogs. We headed home that night with another $150 or so not quite as aggravated with work as when we left.
Tune in for April’s chilling conclusion as the last month in the winter intermission unfolds.