Fred Aiken Writing

As a kid, I sold lemonade and mowed lawns, as I imagine a lot of kids do between 10-14. I also used to housesit for neighbors when they went on vacation, which mostly consisted of looking after pets and plants to ensure neither died. But I guess I wouldn’t necessarily claim that any of those were really jobs, per se, especially since none of them were things I clocked in and out of, but rather were more so random activities that kids tend to do to make a little side money in order to pay for video games. I think I spent a majority of my money on a Nintendo 360 console and then games for it.

But the first job in which an actual institution/organization was paying me would be the tutoring job I jobs I had in college. It paid minimum wage, but thankfully I had enough scholarships to go to school that I didn’t have any student loan debt, so I was able to use the job to pay for energy drinks and cigarettes, which tended to be my college diet for those 4 years. The job mainly consisted of helping students with their papers, so a huge chunk of the time I didn’t really do all that much. I would say I just hung around in the university’s library and read/did my own schoolwork, and then one or two students would come in per shift and I would help them with any issues they were having on whatever draft of a paper they had.

At the time in which I graduated college, the economy happened to be at the tail end of a recession, in fact The Great Recession, as it’s become known as, so not too many companies were hiring. I think I applied to well over 500 companies and went in for about 10 interviews per month, on average, before I ended up just taking a job at a restaurant as a busboy to at least get me through the summer, when hopefully something else more promising would come along.

I never particularly enjoyed the hours of working at a restaurant, since most of my shifts were between 4pm until 2am, with little to no breaks during the shift, but I was good enough at the job. I ended up working my way through the back of the house of that restaurant, from dishwasher to line cook and then eventually pastry chef. I was there just shy of 2 years before getting a job at a pet hotel.

The pet hotel job was another entry-level position, and really the only question I was asked when interviewing for it was whether or not I liked dogs or not, which seems kinda ridiculous in hindsight. I mean, why else would I have applied for the job? And even if I didn’t like dogs all that much, did they really think I would have told them so? But anyway, I did, and still do, like dogs. But liking dogs and working with dogs, I discovered, were two entirely different things. Working with dogs meant dealing with and cleaning up all their messes. The romance of what amounted to dog sitting 25-50 dogs at any given point loses its appeal after picking up the 4th diarrhea within a 15 minute time frame.

The other issue I had with the pet hotel job was the pay. The company I worked for was only given me 20-25 hours per week (to circumvent the then-new rules of the Health Care Act), so I figured I would get another part-time job. And this 2nd part-time job I got was in a cafe. So, for almost 10 years of my life, I worked with dogs and I worked with coffee. I probably put in about 60-70 hours on average. My mental health was at an all time low. But I never felt like I really had time to look for and interview for a full-time job that paid a living wage.

As luck would have it though, and around the same time, oddly enough, both the pet hotel job and the coffee shop job offered me management positions. I would only be able to choose one, and like I said, picking up dog feces for hours on end was not an appealing career path. But ultimately what did it for me was that the coffee shop job had better benefits, better commute, and more opportunities for growth within the company.

So, I became a coffee shop manager. I did that for 2 years, and even excelled in the position. I had very little turnover, my P+L reports looked really good each month, and I had a gotten pretty good at latte art. Plus, I got all the free coffee one would ever need and/or want, so it was a fairly good time. There was the occasional HR issue, especially since the majority of baristas I hired were young, like late teens and early twenties, typically going to college and thus away from home for the first time, aka experiencing ‘freedom’ for the first time. But overall, it was a consistent job with its usual ebbs and flow that I could easily anticipate from one day to the next.

Then the pandemic hit. Everything changed. Everyone was on edge. From workers to customers to higher ups. No one knew what was happening, and job security didn’t seem all that likely for a few months. But federal and local governments called us ‘essential’ workers and urged restaurants, cafes, and grocery stores to stay open. Granted, we were expected to stay open during a global pandemic with no change, absolutely no change, to our pay structure. We were called ‘essential’, alongside healthcare workers, which was explained to me at the time as ‘if multiple food sources and options close, then the remaining open stores would take the brunt of the increase demand and cause ever evolving panic buying’. Though, that I kinda happened anyway, especially with toiletries and sanitizer and face masks like no one’s business.

It was at the 3 month mark of when the pandemic hit the States, around June of 2020, that I looked for a way out of the coffee shop business. Mostly because my mental health was again at an all-time low, and I just knew I more than likely would not like the job for not only months to come, but probably years. So, I loaded up Indeed and went through job listings pages like no one’s business. Eventually, I fell on a help wanted link for a coffee roasting company. No roasting experience required, but had to have at least 2 years experience in the coffee industry (which I had 9 at that point), and ability to work industrial equipment. I had never worked in a warehouse setting, but I figured having multiple years of coffee related experience would work to my benefit. And I was right.

I was hired as a coffee roaster almost 4 years ago. The job is pretty singularly focused, obviously with roasting the coffee being the end-all be-all of my responsibilities. Over the past couple of years, I’ve worked my way up the company, and so now I’m the head coffee roaster, which has meant a few more responsibilities, like scheduling the roast schedule each day based on analyzing sales and trends, green coffee buying, developing relationship with importers and exporters from around the country and world, and developing roast profiles while also conducting quality analysis of new and existing lots of coffee.

At the moment, I’d say I’m pretty content with my job and what I get to do. It’s a pretty easy job once I got use to roasting hundreds of pounds of coffee per hour and not messing up the profiles. Not to say that everything goes perfect each and every day. But when I go in in the morning, the expectations are pretty clear-cut and simple to execute. I mean, I know a lot of analysts and experts say that the arabica coffee supply were be drastically smaller come 2050 due to climate change. But I am constantly reading and researching all the efforts agronomists and various scientists are putting into maintaining and improving each and every crop, including coffee, that I do remain more hopeful than pessimistic at the moment that the industry will be able to circumnavigate the difficulties that might arise.

In terms of what my role will be in the coffee industry, well, that I’m a little uncertain of. I honestly wouldn’t mind remaining a coffee roaster for the next 40 years. The pay isn’t all that bad, and I’m able to afford everything I would want and need, and then some. But I could also see myself in a more permanent coffee buying and trading capacity if the need were to ever arise. But I guess I chose the industry I wanted to be in when I took that management position at a coffee shop all those years ago, and I don’t see me leaving the industry any time soon.