career | Fred Aiken Writing

A Personal Resume, Of Sorts

Daily writing prompt

What jobs have you had?

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.

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May 12, 2024

studying literature//finding a place in an expanding universe

don’t ever tell your boss you studied literature in college,
lest you find yourself writing marketing material
for every email campaign,
for every google and/or facebook ad,
for every product description on the website,
along with every blog post talking about how great the company culture is,
and how other people, other candidates,
should come, follow us down this winding path of job choices,

don’t ever tell your boss you studied literature,
lest you want to become the unpaid copywriter
that gets to tell coworkers when they ask for your help,
‘oh, i’m sorry, i can’t help, i have to write this real quick ad campaign for the boss,
they said they need it by the end of business today,
so i can’t delay’,
never delay, never delay,
don’t ask for my help,
for i’m the token english major writing away

don’t even tell your friends or family that you studied literature,
because then they’ll ask you why,
and comment on how you took on so much student loan debt,
for what? they’ll ask, 
to be able to read shakespeare and sylvia plath?

it won’t matter when you tell them that you received enough scholarships
to cover your college tuition, and so you don’t actually have student loan debt,
because then they will tell you that you wasted
the scholarship money on a meaningless degree that will never amount to anything,
and how you should have studied business or engineering,
or anything that would lead to a well-paying career,

and when you tell them that you didn’t really care about money when you were younger,
that you still don’t really care about money even as an adult,
or at least that you don’t care about money in the capacity of wanting to accumulate a whole bunch of it, but rather,
you’re satisfied so long as all your means are met, like food, water, and shelter,
with one or two streaming service here and there,
you will still get the occasional familial sigh of disapproval from all your uncles,
the sharp tsk-tsk from aunts at family events,
and the weekly phone calls from your parents asking if you’ve gone bankrupt yet,
and they’re always surprised, somehow, when you tell them,
‘no, i’m not a homeless former english major living on the side on the road,
while trying to write the next great american novel,
because i realize my strengths and weaknesses as a writer, 
and i’m not an author, i’m the guy that edits coworkers emails,
and writes all the marketing material for whatever company i work for at the time,’

don’t ever tell anyone you studied literature,
because then you’re liable to write a stupid poem about 
how everyone either expects you to write for them without any extra compensation,
or they worry about your future
and how you could have been a lawyer, doctor, or engineer,
if you’d only studied something, anything, else other than the written word

May 9, 2024

Choosing and Being//A Career Minefield

Daily writing prompt

What is your career plan?

View all responses

Currently, I’m a coffee roaster. Or at least that’s what I get paid to do. I also write poems and stories and music reviews, though none of which do I get paid all that much for, but that’s not really why I write. I just like to write. And then, super-duper part-time, I trade futures contracts. Mostly S&P and Nasdaq futures, but also other commodities.

The main reason that I don’t trade futures or stock options on a more full-time basis is that I find the work incredibly boring. It’s just looking at charts and watching little green and red rectangles go up and down and sideways. So, yeah, I don’t make much money doing it part-time, but it pays for some extra stuff, like beer money and some fancy coffees on occasion. But the other reason I don’t do it on a more full-time basis is that I don’t have the risk tolerance to make it my only form of income. I mean, some traders put up thousands of dollars per trade, whereas I typically put my stop-loss so tight that I’m barely risking $50 per trade. All-in-all, it’s just not a particular passion of mine, so I probably won’t pursue it to the extent that it could be considered a career path.

But coffee roasting is kinda my ideal job. I fell into the coffee industry by accident, though. I came out of college while the economy was still reeling from the effects of the Great Recession, and a majority of companies were not hiring. Or if they were hiring, they were paying minimum wage and yet still requiring a bachelor’s, or sometimes even a master’s, which I’m pretty sure a lot of companies are still doing because insanity typically never truly goes away in any economic transaction to a certain extent.

The only place the would hire me was an entry-level job as a barista. The hours were not super consistent. The tips were okay. But overall, the culture was nice. I got free coffee. And my coworkers were all super friendly and great to be around. So, I couldn’t really complain too much. I mean, other than the fact that it didn’t pay a living wage, and so I had to take on a second job just to make ends meet.

That second job was working at a pet hotel taking care of people’s dogs and cats while they went on vacations that I couldn’t afford. I enjoyed working with dogs and cats because I didn’t have to interact with people at all. But the allure and romance of working with animals loses its appeal after a blind German shepherd diarrheas all over you and it’s the very beginning of your shift so you have to just rinse it off as best you can and work with the overwhelming smell of it for the rest of the day. Also, over the years, it’s become a huge pet peeve of mine that people refer to themselves as a dog or cats ‘pet parent’ rather than owner. I think it’s incredibly dumb, and it’s mostly just a marketing gimmick so people will spend more money on their pets.

Either way, I kinda waffled throughout my twenties between going full-throttle into the coffee business or going into the pet hotel/care business. I worked my way up at both jobs as a supervisor, and then a manager for a fancy pet resort that was expanding in the area that I lived in. But the insurance was crap, and the culture and coworkers wasn’t all that welcoming. So, instead I took a job as a manager of a cafe.

What I learned was that, other than the product/service being sold, being a manager at any company sucks. I dealt with interpersonal issues between coworkers, complaints of customers, dogs having to be rushed to the emergency vet after getting bit by another dog in which the owner didn’t disclose that their dog had a habit of doing this at other facilities, and also having to rush a barista to the hospital after they got burned by ridiculously hot water. I had very little time off work, and the time I did have off of work it always felt like I was thinking about work, and then of course I was technically always on call whenever there was an issue, morning, noon, or night. While the pay for being a manager was alright, I never thought it fully compensated appropriately for just how much of a mental and physical time suck that it was, and I discovered that while I can manage people relatively efficiently, I do not like the job.

And then Covid hit. Covid changed everything for most physical retailers and restaurants. Somehow we were all being called “essential workers” and yet still being paid subpar wages. Also, from my experience, customers became much more combative during the pandemic. Within a month of the lockdowns, I was desperately looking for a way out of managing the cafe I was at. And that’s when the opportunity to roast coffee came in.

It happened to be a roastery that didn’t have a brick-and-mortar location, so they only sold coffee online, which during the pandemic meant business was booming. When I became their newest roaster, I oddly enough happened to be the only employee there that had more than 5 years of experience in the coffee industry. It was a serendipitous choice. I found that I enjoyed working in a warehouse environment away from the public and not interacting with customers on a daily basis. Plus, I got to drink as much coffee as I wanted.

I did, however, take a slight pay cut at first. But as I’ve moved up from roaster apprentice to now the company’s head roaster, I was able to more than make up for the initial loss in income. Plus, it’s no longer mentally taxing to the point where when I leave the warehouse to go home I don’t bring the work with me, other than the coffee. That I am able to take home with me in overabundance.

Right now, my role as a coffee roaster is ideal for what I’m looking for in a career. Stable hours, a field that I’m passionate about, and having very little to no one to answer to so long as the coffee keeps coming out good. But in terms of the future, I have no idea. To a certain extent, I feel a bit pigeonholed into remaining in the coffee industry. Even though I never anticipated or planned on being in coffee much longer than a couple of years when I was a barista, now it’s been well over a decade, and I’ve devoted quite a bit of time and energy learning and developing within the field.

So, who knows. Maybe the next step is to start working on the importing and exporting side. I have enjoyed the few times being able to travel to some coffee-producing countries and meeting farmers and producers, along with a host of other workers associated with moving coffee along the trade path. But working on the trading side of coffee would mean having to pay attention to little green-and-red chart patterns to guess at what the market is going to do, and I’m not super thrilled at that possibility.

The other possibility is forming my own roasting and coffee business. I don’t like the idea of owning my own business either, but it would more than likely be the most profitable in the long run…maybe. Though the idea of creating another coffee business in an already overly saturated market when most experts are predicting that coffee’s landscape will look drastically different by 2050 due to climate change does not seem like a promising prospect. Seems more like a gamble.

But, if everything goes according to what climate activists and televangelists are saying/predicting, then I imagine there won’t really be much of a future and I won’t have to worry about what career I’ve made in the apocalypse.

Fred Aiken Writing

Tag: career

May 29, 2024