I remember the first time my mom took me to Starbucks and my lips first made contact with a mocha frappuccino. Drinking coffee in a milkshake-type form was a step up from scooping the whipped cream off my mom’s lattes and if you were seen at school with a Starbucks cup, you could almost feel the envious glares from across the middle school cafeteria. Although, I love a good frappuccino every now and then, my taste for coffee expanded and I started to branch out to local coffee shops around my town. I loved the atmosphere and homey aesthetic that came with hole-in-the-wall coffee places.

Luckily, when I got to college, coffee shops were the perfect place to study and hang out with friends. Also, espresso was your best friend on the nights you only got three hours of sleep because you forgot that lab report was due at 8AM. I made it my mission to visit every coffee related place within a five-mile radius of my campus. The more places I visited, the more I imagined that being a barista had to be the best job in the world. So during the summer, I decided to have some fun and work at a local coffee shop in my hometown. Let’s just say it was nothing like I expected.

The actual job itself wasn’t bad at all. We had a machine that automatically dispensed espresso and steamed milk to the proper temperature without scalding it. I picked up pretty quick and before I knew it, I was waking up at 5AM to open the store three days a week. For a person who sleeps until noon most days, opening that early was a huge adjustment. I did get free, unlimited iced coffee though so how bad could it be?

You would like to think that smelling like coffee constantly would be a dream. Well, it’s not. By my third shift of the week, my shirt smelled like stale coffee and burnt milk. No matter how much I washed it. The smell was practically engrained in my shirt. I found coffee beans literally everywhere. Sometimes they would be in my pockets and sometimes in my purse. No clue how they got there. Customers would literally come back hours later to yell at you because there wasn’t enough vanilla in their chai latte. And they always did it when you were busy.

For every awful latte combination and every obnoxious child, there was at least one person who would tip you five dollars or one regular customer that you would truly made a connection with. Not to mention all the great coworkers I got to share these crazy experiences with. At the end of the day, that was what kept bringing me back. I knew that someone would make a small gesture that would completely change my outlook on the day.

Working at a coffee shop maybe wasn’t all it was cracked up to be but at least I can walk away with an outlook that I can use in the future.

“For every bad thing in life, there are more good things to tip the balance.” – Richelle Mead