Friday
4:00 am. Buzz. Alarm. My mind quickly and sleepily "justifies" hitting snooze.
4:15 am. Buzz. Second alarm. Similar thin justification.
4:30 am. Buzz. Repeat above.
4:40 am. Buzz. Alarm. The realization that if I do not get up RIGHT NOW I will not be able to take my shower, and will feel gross the entire day penetrates my foggy mind.
5:25 am. Trumble [v. to simultaneously stumble and traipse] down the stairs, slap the temporary parking pass in the car, and drag down to work.
5:30-8:30 smile, serve, schmooze, repeat.
BUT THEN...
...the phone rings. My co-worker's face is one of bewilderment as she hangs up the phone and then tells me to go lock the front door. Then, in a louder voice, "if everyone in the store could please move toward the bathrooms, the police are dealing with a situation out front and have told us that no one may go in or out, and we must stay toward the back of the store." Looking out the bay windows, I did not see a drunken homeless man brandishing random cutlery as I had expected. I didn't see anything at first. So she pointed. "See that? That black thingy on the newspaper box? Someone called it in as a suspicious looking object, and so the bomb squad is on the way." Sure enough, perched right next to our garbage cans, where it had been all morning was an ominous plastic object. And there we were, the three baristas, George, Marie, Frank and five other customers I had never seen before squishing chairs into the corner of the store.
At first I wasn't at all concerned. I had seen a bomb threat called in once before in Boise. They send in a robot which then lifts the package and examines it, and it's all perfectly safe relatively speaking. But wait, I had seen that from across the parking lot, and it didn't even look all that dangerous and the robot was cool. This is different. That window is less than a hundred feet from me, and beyond it there is no one in sight. Not even an eager crowd of the morbidly curious.
Ahhh, and then the thoughts started winding through my head. I should probably tell Sarah that I'm in this situation. She's working just up the street right now, and if something happened, she'd have to know where to find me. I should clean that shelf while I'm back here, because it's not like I can be up front making drinks right now. How sad would it be if I died tragically working in a coffee shop? I should get my life planned out so that when I die, it will at least be doing something worthwhile. How bizarre would that be if something did happen? Is that bomb technician wearing a space suit? It's green. Like maybe a camouflaged space suit for special missions on some green planet.
An hour and a half of these sorts of spotty thoughts, and I had worked myself into some measure of nervousness. Still, I had the foolish courage to move toward the window the get a better look as the technician opened the case and flicked out a wireless stage microphone. Someone had obviously played a set at the bar next door last night, put the mic on the newspaper box to finish loading the van, and driven away leaving us a scare for the next day. So we let the imprisoned customers out to rearrange their appointments, and finished up the shift; some (ahem, that would be myself) with hearts beating slightly irregularly.
And that, my friends, was the tale of the day that was not the same as the rest.
