Fred Aiken Writing

Tag: Blog

May 26, 2024

Good-ish on a Good Day

Daily writing prompt
What are you good at?
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Not much. But I also have a somewhat self-deprecating personality.

If I’m being honest, then I guess I have a handful of skills and hobbies that I’m good at. I play a lot of chess, so I suppose you could say I’m good at that. Not great. I don’t have the patience or intelligence to be a grandmaster or anything close to that, like an international master or candidate master. But I can hold my own in bullet and blitz matches.

Then there’s also sewing tote bags from coffee burlap jute. I started making tote bags from the coffee burlap a year or so ago because I like some of the designs on the coffee jute bags that the company I work for was getting in, so I figured I could make tote bags for myself to use for grocery shopping, since I’m not a huge fan of using the plastic grocery store bags. And I’ve gotten pretty good and efficient at making them to the point where I’m even able to sell them on etsy.

Now, I’m not all that good at sewing in general. Outside of sewing tote bags, I have never sewn anything else, though I have patched a few holes in some socks and pants. But in terms of making elaborate costumes or clothing by sewing them myself, I wouldn’t know where to start. I’d probably just watch a series of youtube videos and give up if the process took longer than a couple of hours.

I used to be a lot better at writing. I even won a few contests back in college. But when I started working, especially working 10-12 hour days, I sort of stopped. I mean, I’ve finally gotten to a point in my life where I’m only working 8 hours at most, which has allotted me the free time to pick up writing again. But I know I’m not nearly as proficient or good as I used to be. Perhaps it’s just my style changing. At first I thought I needed to recapture the type of voice I had when I was younger. But I’ve come to realize that I’m not that same person, so I don’t write in that same fashion. Though overall, I like to think that I can still write pretty well.

And because I was a barista for so long, I’m actually pretty good at latte art and making a nice cup of coffee in pretty much any format, from percolation to aeropress to espresso. I competed in a couple of latte throw downs in a few Specialty Coffee Association events. I certainly was never the best there, but I could hold my own.

I’m also really good at not spending money. I feel like that might not seem like much of a skill, but when I read articles saying how a large portion of the population is living paycheck to paycheck, I think economic literacy is one of those underrated skill sets that sometimes gets overlooked because our society values debt so much. I personally really dislike owing anyone any amount of money, but I also don’t like giving companies my money when they so rarely deserve it.

I don’t think I’d describe any of my talents or skills as being the best out there, but in a way, well, I guess I’m not all that bad at a handful of things.

Though of all the things I’m good at, I think the list of things I’m either so-so or bad at is much, much larger. But hey, maybe that’s another skill that I’m good at; acknowledging my limitations.

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May 11, 2024

Math in Busy Business Suits

My boss sends me a Slack message, How long will it take you to roast 80,000lbs of coffee? I immediately think it’s a trick question meant to keep me on my toes. But then I see that he’s still typing. The next message is that based on his calculation, it would take a little under 200 hours to roast 80,000lbs of coffee. He’s serious.

Fuck. He’s serious.

So, I finished roasting the Sumatra Gayo coffee I was currently in the middle of, and then I pull up the computer’s calculator. The roaster that I use has a max capacity of 35kg, which is about 77lbs. But coffee loses about 13-15% of its weight going from green to roasted due to water loss, so a max-capacity batch roasted to a light or medium roast would be approximately 65lbs, give or take. And the roaster can only roast 4 roasts per hour.

With all that in mind, I run the numbers of how many roasts I would need to do, and it’s about 1230 roasts that I would need to do, which would come out to be about 307 hours thereabouts. But more than likely it would be more. There’s a lingering unforeseen, invisible calculus being orchestrated in any mathematical business decision. Sure, my boss and I can run the numbers and say, well, that’s how long it should take to roast that much coffee. But obviously there would need to be down time. There would need to be time for maintenance on the roaster. Time to load the machine. Time to clean the machine.

I can easily take that 307 hours of roasting and stretch it to 400, possibly even 500 easy.

I ask, When would the client need this coffee?

In 3 weeks. 4 tops.

Not possible. Not even close. I work 40hours. It would mean I would need to roast 24/7. I wouldn’t be able to, no one would.

To which he responds, We would hire temps. You could train them to roast this one specific coffee on a specific roast profile. It’ll be fine. We’ll add a 2nd and 3rd shift.

Maybe. But logistically it would be a nightmare. There’s any number of things that can go wrong during a roast. You’re dealing with a big metal drum spinning over a flame that’s being fed by natural gas. Coffee can and does combust given enough thermodynamic energy. It’s not like we couldn’t train a small army of temps to roast around the clock. But again, the roasting machine is, well, a machine. It needs time to cool down, undergo maintenance, cleaned, and given a little breathing room less something dramatic happen. Like for the roaster to explode.

Which has happened. The first week I started roasting, the owner of the company implored me to take special note of all the safety training I went through because less than a month prior a roastery in Colorado exploded from a production roaster not paying attention and the gas line ignited and blew the entire place to kingdom come. Though thankfully everyone survived. They made sure to make note of that when recounting the anecdote of why it was important not to mess up the roasting machine; I guess so the tale didn’t seem too grim.

Either way, roasting 80,000lbs of coffee at our company would be a herculean undertaking. There’s plenty of macroroasters that would easily do that sort of roasting in under a week. But unfortunately we’re not that type of roaster. I also happened to do the math of how many bags of green coffee that would require, and we wouldn’t even have the space to store it prior to the coffee being roasted. The potential client would have wanted 80,000lbs of Brazilian coffee, which comes in burlap jute bags that weigh 59kg. That brings the total to 715 bags needed. The warehouse holds approximately 400 bags of coffee at any given point.

Any way you split it, such a project would not be feasible when all the numbers are taken in to consideration. But this is all just to say that I guess I owe my 6th grade algebra teacher an apology when I told them that I would never need to know math in the real world because I had planned on becoming a professional skateboarder when I was younger. I suppose that goes to show just how little you can plan out your life when you’re just going through puberty and trying to ollie down ten step stairs on a regular basis.

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