by Jesse Raub

When I told my parents I was going to transfer from my monastery-adjacent, small, embedded-in-the woods private college to a large, low-standard, fine-arts based college in the heart of downtown Chicago, they did what any normal set of small-town liberal-Minnesotan education-positive parents would: they accepted my challenge for freedom and sent me on my way with little resistance.

“I want to study Fiction Writing,” I told them from the breakfast bar in their kitchen, chowing down on some cereal while home for spring break.  “I just don’t think St. John’s has anything to offer me.”

And even though I could see the sadness in my father’s eyes and the fear and revulsion in my mom’s, they both knew I was right.  I had spent the better part of the first semester planning out my path for becoming an English major, and then wondering what the hell I was going to do with it.

“Go, run!” my advisor told me (in so many words).

“Oh, I’d love to see you at Iowa!” she exclaimed when I told her I wanted to find a writing program at a different school.  We both figured that a writing degree was just as useless as an English degree, but at least it was something I wanted to study and I would end up with an eventual skill besides analyzing the sexual implications of a budding feminist movement through 17th century epistolary novels.

But the thing is, Iowa is a prestigious writing school.  So I did the next best thing and committed to Columbia College Chicago.  The courses were easy enough, the education was more than adequate, and more importantly, they didn’t require a portfolio to be accepted.  In fact they didn’t require anything.  The school has an open enrollment policy.

There are a few things you learn about people who think they’re going to be the next Chabon or even Nabokov.  The first is that they’re all budding alcoholics and chain smokers.  The second is that they all work for Starbucks and hate their lives.

So when I graduated and moved to a small college town for my fiancee to attend grad school, I did what everyone with a degree in writing does: I got a job at a Starbucks.  The hours were terrible, the coffee was mediocre to bad, the employees were fun, and the customers were hell.  But there was a special kind of torture for people like me.  A special torture known as Starbucks Corporate Advertising Campaigns.

Companies like Starbucks thrive on one thing alone: the idea that they’re an independent thinking, artistically aware, hip place for the young professional to get their coffee drinks.  The main way to convey this message is through in-store, word-heavy advertising campaigns.

So it’s no surprise that one day, when cleaning the bathroom, I came upon a poster on the wall that read in faux, computer generated cursive: “Behind every cup of coffee, there’s a good story.”  The poster featured “hand-painted” coffee mugs, each one with a short sentence etched into the dark paint that was to represent the coffee.

“Last Christmas, she baked us the most amazing cookies. It’s nice when customers are nice,” one read.

“I like to play Backgammon with Sam on my breaks, even though he cleans my clock,” read another. Each one was slightly more depressing than the last.

“I can identify my regular drive-thru customers by the sounds of their engines.”

The last one was the one that got me.  It was like the first sentence of the saddest short story never written.  I couldn’t imagine how horribly depressing it might be to listen to people’s car engines indling through some barista’s headset at three in the afternoon, only to think 1982 Ford LTD.  Frank’s here, black coffee, no tip.

“Neil is my human VCR. He’s always able to tell me what I missed on TV last night.”

Working at Starbucks has left me so poor, I couldn’t make the Rent-A-Center payments on my television.  To compensate, I allow a severely autistic disabled man to recite every line from a reality competition television show in order to keep me entertained enough to not pour scalding milk down the waistband of my pants.

“I think Abby has been working on her novel for six years now.”

That one that killed me.  Nothing is more embedded with the reek of failure than public writing.  The need for public acceptance of your addiction to re-working that shitty piece of crime fiction that has no motive or resolution yet but you’re just so attached to the main character who’s a plucky, perky, sassy middle-aged woman who is an amalgamation of  everything you wish you were—it almost makes you want to cry.

But even sadder is imagining the poor young graduate with a degree in creative writing, settling into the desk on his first month on the job in the marketing department at Starbucks HQ, stressing over the syntax of the newest ad campaigns where his attempt to outline other people’s failures is the only thing keeping his head out of his gas oven.  ‘Cause man, I can relate.

“The Saddest Short Stories Never Written” by Jesse Raub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.