My calling

"Fill the light base to the first line of the plastic cup, fill it with ice, drop it into the blender, then add the three shots of caramel and blend it on the 2 setting," I called to another barista while steaming a grande decaf soy white chocolate mocha.

"No seriously, how long have you worked here?" one of the other trainees asked.

"Um, what time is it?"

For years, I've said, half jokingly, that the best job I ever had was when I worked at a coffee shop after college. The pay was crap, and you had to stand all day, but I was good at it. And it was just fun.

I've always wondered how much of that was just me remembering that time without thinking about the obnoxious bits. But after my first day behind the counter at Barnes and Noble's cafe today, I'd have to say I was right. This really is a great job. Now if it only paid three times as much...

It didn't take me long to pick the barista gig back up. B&N has a super streamlined approach to making Starbucks stuff, so it only took me an hour or so to get caught up on the basics. The cafe (like the rest of the store) is stocking up on pre-holiday workers, so I worked with two other trainees and a manager today. Everyone was great, and I feel it's worth noting, everyone had a college degree.

So it's nice to know that if I am going to have a part-time retail job during the holiday rush, it will at least be somewhere that I enjoy. I work the cafe again tomorrow, then train in the bookstore the next day. But because of my barista experience, I'm guessing they're going to keep me in the cafe. That's fine with me. A lot of the employee training is focused on stopping/preventing shoplifting, so at least that's one thing I don't have to worry about when I'm brewing coffee.