all resumes look like
business to-do lists,
or business trophy shelves of empty accomplishments and
skill sets that no longer look impressive,
now that a computer can do them much better and faster,
though at least i get to keep my business card
I’ve gone through several iterations of work-home balances. Unfortunately, growing up in the States, it was ingrained within me that in order to achieve some semblance of happiness and worth within society that I needed to accumulate things, e.g. cars, house, phone, random stuff in storage that only comes out once every year or so, and the only way to accumulate these coveted things was by working. Or so the theory goes.
So, throughout my twenties when I got out of college I worked incredibly hard. I worked multiple jobs, sometimes 3 or 4 at a time. I used to work from 5am till well past 10pm. I had little to no social life, which wasn’t all that bad because even if I hadn’t been working, I doubt I would have been all that social since I’m incredibly introverted and do not like conversing with people generally. But I was constantly stressed. I felt like I wasn’t doing anything right.
But the goal was to always reach a point where I would work incredibly long, but hopefully efficient, amount of time, and then I would get to retire, or at least reach a point of financial independence where money was something of an afterthought. And if all went well, then I would be able to retire much sooner than my mid-to-late sixties. Ideally, maybe even in my forties, but I wasn’t completely unrealistic and was at least shooting for my late fifties so I could enjoy the last 20-30 years of remaining of my life to do whatever I pleased.
Though, like I said, I was always stressed. I was miserable. I pulled away from my wife, from my parents, from my siblings, and anyone and everyone that cared for me. I told myself that I was working so hard and so much in order to improve my station in life. I was at the brink of completely losing everyone around me before I realized that my constant state of working all of the time and never taking time to actually live was destroying whatever sort of future I imagine I could lead at the end of the working rainbow.
So, I pulled back. I took one job with regular hours doing something that I don’t need to stress about (a common mantra in the coffee industry from barista to roaster to importer is ‘it’s just coffee‘), and I’ve rediscovered hobbies and interests I once had, like reading, writing, and playing chess, along with a handful of interests I didn’t know I had, like sewing and learning a new language.
I think the biggest challenge and realization that I needed to make about developing a healthy work-life balance was understanding that jobs and careers and anything to do with making money, unless it’s a passion, is not the end-all be-all of life. It’s just a way of sustaining oneself, and as long as what I do at work provides enough for me to live off of and save a little bit for when I do reach a point where I no longer need to work, then I’m good. I don’t need to overexert myself to the point of exhaustion because the only thing that will lead to is failing relationships and a deteriorating mental state.
Some of the biggest regrets I’ve made in life were confusing working with living, and listening to individual and societal voices that rewarded that mentality of constantly pushing myself to physical and mental exhaustion rather than taking time off and reorienting my priorities around the people and activities that I enjoy doing.
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.
Fred Aiken Writing 