A quick break from marriage talk and my parents....

There's always got to be some sort of pecking order in life. In basic training eight years ago, I had to learn my chain of command and all of the rules associated with greeting soldiers of higher rank. I spent hours in the classroom learning how to stand at ease when talking sergeants, addressing officers as sir/mam unless they're a captain (or is it sergeant major?), how to salute (only outside, never indoors, never in the courtyard of the pentagon), and how to enter a room for a board (center yourself on the highest rank then salute, ignore the "don't salute inside" rule). The list of rules goes on. Looking back on my military career that is now approaching the 8 year mark, I remember countless times when I would intentionally take the long way around a building or make sure to carry lots of equipment so that I could avoid areas of high "officer" concentration. It was always confusing to me how to handle situations like these and in basic, I also learned that if you handled it the wrong way, they would start yelling at you and you would have to do lots of push-ups. So yeah...to this day I avoid officers, which can be a difficult task for a band member. Believe it or not we actually play some pretty prestigious and high profile gigs.

Today I worked a 12 hour shift at Starbucks setting up the new store. It's apparently going to be the flagship (and biggest) store for the state of Colorado pulling in around $75,000 dollars a week for the company so I guess it's a pretty big deal. It was funny to watch everything unfold. Early this morning our district manager came in and everyone got really stressed because the old store looked like a mess and we were still serving coffee. Then we closed up shop and moved to set up the new store and rumors of the regional manager began to circulate. Some people called him "Mr. Jones" while others just called him by his position. "Region is coming soon. Get busy. Make yourself useful. Wipe down that display case." When he finally came he fit the perfect model of corporate management. Overly enthusiastic and trying way to hard to make us lowly baristas think that he actually cares how our day is going and whether we're excited about the new store. When he met me he said that even though he has to remember over 10,000 different names of all of the baristas in his region, he would commit to remembering mine. Right....and who cares how many names he has to remember anyway? He also drove a BMW that was just a little nicer than the one "district" drove which was just a little nicer than the mini-van our store manager drove (she's a mom). After a couple of encounters with "Region" I found myself avoiding him too. This time not out of fear of push-ups. Mostly just cause I wanted to sit alone in my corner and set up my display case of crazy expensive holiday mugs and promotional espresso machines and not have to fake the enthusiasm that seems to be an unwritten job requirement of working for the man. (Actually it's written. We call it "Legendary Service"). There were rumors of an even higher-up coming but he/she never surfaced. Probably in the next week or so he/she will enter with rays of bright light beaming from all orifices and doves circling overhead. I can only hope that I'm not working that shift.

Anyways, it all falls into place. The whole pecking order of importance. You can fight it and debate whether our society places value in the wrong things and whether or not the attributes necessary to rise to the top in corporate America are actually important and eternal attributes, or you can laugh it off. Which is what I'm choosing to do today.