I sold my soul to coffee when I was sixteen.

New feature: I will be writing essays here and there, which will be more reminiscent and personally anecdotal than my normal spit-it-out blogging. I hope you like it!

I have been drinking coffee since my mother introduced me to the decadence that is iced coffee, the summer I was fifteen. Fresh brewed coffee, with heavy whipping cream, put over a glass mug full of ice cubes. I still wax nostalgic over glass mugs with that lovely light-brown latte held within.

I did not become an avid coffee consumer, however, until I was sixteen years old and working for a very small real estate office in a small town in Michigan. It was a full time job, and my mother was one of the agents there, which was partly how I was able to get an interview for the job.

It was one of the most boring jobs in the world, because there was usually nothing to do except sit at the desk and wait for the phone to ring. The drafty old building had a big glass window overlooking the sidewalk in the front room, which was where my ugly grey desk sat. I brought CDs to work and played them in the computer, not too loud of course, trying to stay awake. There was an occasional fax, on shiny-slippery paper, that had to be helped from the machine and cut into appropriately sized pieces of paper, then distributed to the right agent. Sometimes I would be doing an MLS search, for one of the agents who was eager to sell something – anything – to some buyers they had managed to scoop up from somewhere.

I began going across the street to the gas station and getting a cup of cheap (and disgusting) coffee, liberally doctoring it with flavored powdered creamer. They almost never had liquid cream, but I was willing to forego that in order to keep from surrendering to slumber and waking up with my own saliva crusted to the side of my face. After a few weeks, I was up to using their biggest cup size, and going back to refill it twice a day. It was official. I was an addict. And the more I drank it, the more it didn’t work.

Of course, now I know that ennui brought on by boredom cannot usually be cured by repeated jolts of caffeine, and I laugh at my sixteen-year-old self for trying so hard to be present for a job that barely noticed I was there unless there was a fax or, even more rare, a walk-in customer!

I once was screamed at by the agent there who fancied herself the most important and also, apparently, excessively wealthy. For the entire ten months I worked there, I never saw her make commissions on any properties whatsoever, and she often complained about having no business. But she dressed expensively, wore thick makeup and heavy jewelry, and drove a Cadillac, which in small-town Michigan means that you either have money or you think you do.

(This was a woman who told me that she fell asleep in a tub full of hot soapy water every night, woke up around four in the morning, drained the tub, and filled it up again and fell back asleep. I constantly wondered if she had pruney skin under all the pricey clothing. I also wondered how she escaped drowning when she tempted fate every single night.)

She screamed at me because I threw something away that she had asked me to search for, print out, and then discarded at my desk, walking away without giving me any other instructions. I had been duly frightened by the main office manager, who worked out of the bigger office in a bigger town, about the consequences of presiding over a dirty office – so I quickly threw it away. Hours later she came out demanding that I give her something, and it took me at least five minutes to even begin to get an inkling of what she was asking me for.

She became increasingly frustrated with me, her eyes beginning to bug out of her head, which caused me to notice just how dirty her expensive thick glasses were; then, in a fit of rage, she pulled the offending paper out of the trash under my desk, waving it in front of her face, the paper rattling angrily, while she screeched at me:

“IF I PAID YOU WHAT YOU WERE WORTH,” she screamed, “YOU WOULDN’T BE MAKING MUCH, NOW WOULD YOU?!” Then she took a few deeply upset breaths, turned on her heel, and stormed back to her office. Her obvious indignity was so thick it seemed to trail behind her.

I stood there puzzled and shocked, wondering how a person who appears intelligent can do such a terribly unclear job of asking for something, and gradually became worried about my further employment. It took me several minutes to remember that she was not, in fact, solely in charge of my payroll, or I am positive she would have fired me on the spot.

The funny part was that my mother was standing right there, her cubicle being closest to the reception area, and once the offending agent had huffed out of the office for the day (by the back door, because she’d never park her precious Caddy in the front parking), she and I had a hysterical sort of laugh over it, while I clutched my styrofoam cup of now-cold coffee as a sort of protective talisman.

I still drink coffee every day, but not to the extent that I did when I worked for the real estate office. To this day, I wonder how many other people offended that woman on a daily basis while blithely going about their business, and how many conniptions she threw before someone was sassy enough to scream back at her for it.