1986. I was 18, and I wanted to die. I had graduated from high school with honors, but home had turned upside down, and so I moved out. Much, much too soon. The first job I had was waitressing at a cheap steak house. I moved into a ground floor, one-bedroom slum apartment on a main bus route in a depressed suburb with my best girlfriend and her boyfriend. They got the bedroom. I had undiagnosed anxiety, and struggled to do the waitressing job, only relaxing if a table with kids came in: that somehow put me at ease. At a cheap steak house, few people order wine or beer. Coffee, endless amounts of coffee, is the preferred beverage. This was a good decade before the you-know-who coffee people introduced the idea that there could be anything other than regular and decaf coffee, so we worked with a rotating series of glass bubble pots, trying to keep them full and fresh from restaurant opening (people will eat at a salad bar at ten minutes after eleven am, who knew?) until the very last plastic creamer splashed onto the plastic tablecloth. I didn’t drink coffee, but I knew that people who wanted decaf, REALLY wanted decaf, and that it was important not to confuse the pots. The decaf pot had an orange stripe painted around the glass, so I could handle that. What I couldn’t handle was carrying both pots at once. This, it turned out was an unexpected requirement of the job. The manager, who was probably called Cheryl, showed me, many times, how to gently grasp each handle with one hand, lifting the pots aloft in one elegant swoop, and thus saving “the trip” if someone wanted decaf. The total square footage of the restaurant could likely fit inside a contemporary double garage, so why saving time was such a frantic concern, I could never understand. In any case, delays were inevitably the fault of the kitchen staff. Never underestimate the work involved in keeping a salad bar stocked. Still, when Cheryl caught me with just the one pot, she would send me back to the coffee station for the other, and time after time CRACK! – the pots would come together and both smash to bits, hot coffee onto the carpeted floor, shards everywhere. I never got burned or cut myself, or anyone else, but I was mortified. At the end of my shift, I would step outside, perhaps walk across the street to the Shell Station for pack of cigarettes (two bucks), and then walk the half kilometer to the apartment, often empty, and bereft of either food or comfort. I remember feeling incredibly lonely, stupid, angry, confused, and of course, afraid. I think I broke eight coffee pots before I decided I was unfit for waitressing. I quit. The coffee pots were just a small thing, but for me seemed a sign that I was useless. You know where else folks drink a lot of coffee? On a psychiatric ward. No glass pots there though. Styrofoam cups. Plastic lids. Stay tuned.