Chapter 1.2

To facilitate living so far from where I worked it became necessary to purchase a car. As luck would have it, Jon had a spare sporty thing just waiting for me to swoop in and buy. For people how have seen my DVD collection and realize that I own the new "Italian Job" it's perhaps not too surprising that I like driving quick little cars faster than is strictly legal and that my turns are rather sharper than necessary. So it will be unsurprising when I describe the car as a sliver 2-door with rims and darkly tinted front windows that rode only a couple of inches off the asphalt. Jon and I affectionately called it the go-cart because you really did feel as though you were in nothing more than a turbo-charged cart just built for those drive-under-the-semi-stunts.

Chapter 1.1

It seems I have fallen out of chronology. Before I quit my coffee job my oldest cousin and his wife moved to the Eastern Shore of Maryland which is about a half-hour away from Annapolis. Because they have the world's most adorable two-year-old, and because they had twin girls on the way, and because their generous nature involves taking in homeless family members, I decided to move outta town.

Chapter 1

I had been working at the Green Hut for not even ten months before I looked down and realized that much of my soul had been sucked from my body. This was naturally disconcerting. And so I sought the exact cause of my misery. The answer is as old a capitalism. It is the hateful nature of the corporate beast to ignore the individuality of its parts in favor of a uniformed whole. Therefore all the "cool" people to work with had already quit or been "released", and my own unique ways of working were being threatened into extinction. The final straw landed when I began to be graded on customer interactions. Oh yes, that's right; I said, 'graded on customer interactions.' This meant that my manager literally sat down with a piece of paper and watched me as I placed the finished drinks on the counter and informed the customers that their drinks were ready. If I didn't happen to make eye contact with the under-caffeinated grumpy old guy and say, 'thank you,' then it got marked down as an incorrect interaction (presumably to be used as a an excuse when it came time to give me a raise).
So to make a potentially self-indulgent whiney story short, I quit my job at the coffee shop and began to work as an ABA Therapist.