I am settling more into a regular routine now, three weeks into school. Classes four days a week, work the other three. Which means I don't really have any days off, but some days are lighter than others.
And some are more stressful. I've been at Starbucks three months now. I'm pretty comfortable doing the job most of the time, but the stress level has not significantly abated and I don't think it's going to. The store is quite high-volume - we can get as many as 100 customers an hour - and there's the usual mix of personalities and staff drama to cope with. It can get hectic but it's really not all that bad.
No, the real stress comes from being located in a less than pristine part of town (Market Street, not too far from the Tenderloin). On a daily if not hourly basis, we have to deal with people who come in and try to steal anything they can lay their hands on -- from our tip jar to bags of whole coffee beans -- to drunks who fall asleep in the cafe and piss all over themselves and our chairs, to my personal least-favorite: junkies who shoot up in the bathroom and leave blood splatters all over the place. Sometimes they'll leave a used syringe as a parting gift. This last is particularly unpleasant, because since you don't know what kind of diseases the junkie might have, we have to lock down the bathroom until we can do a major disinfecting scrubdown.
I'm a lifelong city-dweller, so being annoyed by homeless people is hardly new to me, but I have to say that the homeless we have to deal with here do seem to be more distressing than the ones I dealt with in New York. Granted I never worked in a Starbucks when I was in New York, so maybe I was just oblivious to it there. I don't know. But as much as I enjoy slinging coffee, I would definitely be happier if I could do it someplace where I did not have to deal with junkies, people who piss themselves, and petty thieves all the time.
Plus I have a quiz tomorrow and I hope I'm going to do well on it. It's been a long, long time since I've had to study for this kind of test and I hope I'm retaining the right information from the readings assigned.
