BRENTZILLA

(This was about to be a response to my friend at A Traveling Mom, who blogged about coffee. Then I realized I could feed my own blog!)

My first job out of school (besides the part-time stringing I was doing for San Diego County’s second-largest newspaper, The North County Times) was coffee jockey at an independent coffee stand operating out of San Diego Children’s Hospital.

Obviously, it was just a part-time gig, before embarking on a full-time journalism career at the paper, perhaps covering the police beat… which would ultimately lead to the Pulitzer…

(This excellent, devious plan experienced derailment by a hiring freeze at the Times. I moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area and become a copywriter. So it goes. But I digress…)

My boss thought it would be clever to decorate the coffee cart as some sort of fuel depot. I wore a gas-station attendent’s bright red polyester button-up shirt with blue piping and a big, sloppy collar. The thing hung loose and limp around my body, with a patch reading “SPEEEDY” sewn on the breast pocket. Ugly as hell. I wore it outside work because I was ironic like that. And my girlfriend still liked me anyway.

Moving on: I enjoyed talking with parents and relatives. Sometimes they had good days, others bad. In a way (sometimes a sick-but-I-can’t-turn-my-head-away way), it was like watching little real-life television dramas unfolding before me.

Not just the tragedies involving accidents or sickness. Family stuff.

Parents bickered under their breaths about who would pay what bill, take the car in for an oil change, mow the lawn, maintain the pool. Sometimes, it was about which one should visit their child on this-or-that day, because the other had to get back to work at some point. And one day, a woman visiting her child was there with a guy who was not her husband, but certainly was her boyfriend…

I was basically invisible. Why should these customers care about what the fuel attendant thought? It’s not like I’d be at the same social functions, whispering about them, judging them. Blogging about them.

Then there were the doctors. The horrible, horrible doctors. Well, not the younger ones, they were still polite. The elder caste, however, were often snotty brats. One doctor decided that I knew I was supposed to put two Sweet-n-Lows into her latte before making it — then threw a fit when I hadn’t. I mean, hello? Communicate much?

I would hate to have her at my bedside.

Oh, and the doctors had running accounts, so they never paid — and they never tipped. Once I found out I was frozen out of the hiring pool at the paper, I quit the cart, got my move on and never worked coffee again.