Fred Aiken Writing

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.