A Reminiscing Kind of Drive
Ben wondered why the weather apps were so lousy at warning him of the miserable rain that even an umbrella wouldn’t protect someone from becoming soggy. Getting to his car brought the proverbial, “Damn, I should have started my car before I left the office so it would be warm.”
Pulling out of the lot, the automatic windshield wipers didn’t know what to do because, while the rain was just enough to clog up the view, it was not hard enough to trigger the sensor of the wipers to tell them to swipe away the water. Ben, with an annoying grimace on his face, had to constantly turn the wipers off and on. The “intermittent” setting for the wipers was completely forgotten by Ben, instead he just kept grumbling, moving the control lever up and down, to trigger the wipers, as his car made its way down the street to the light.
While waiting for the left turn arrow, Ben was trying to think when he switched coffee shops. “Hmm,” he thought as he tried to roll back the calendar in his head, “five or six years ago?”
What he did remember was that early in his career at Tech Solutions, he realized quickly that he needed to find a way to get out of his office for lunch.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to eat in the office cafeteria, it was mostly that people would seek him out when he wasn’t at his desk. Instead of a quiet hour by himself, or at least just away from work, he would generally get sucked back into solving some kind of problem as his lunch hour ticked away. As the interruptions gained in number throughout his first year at the job, Ben decided there had to be somewhere that he could escape.
The arrow turned green, Ben made the left turn and continued down the road, and he was back to the on again, off again of the windshield wipers. The lunchtime rush of cars was scrambling around him to get to the sandwich shops and fast foods places up ahead.
He had made this trip so many times that his driving was on autopilot, and Ben drifted back into the memory of when he needed his “escape” plan. He remembered opening up a map and investigating the world around the office building. He was happy to find a couple of places that weren’t too far of a drive to go for a walk during his lunch. This worked well during the summer months of his first year as he “escaped” the office, and even on the days the weather was lousy, Ben would drive to the park and just sit in the lot, calmed by the rain that surrounded his car. For him, it was like a soothing, sound machine.
Then the colder months came, and Ben knew the parking lot wouldn’t really be an option any longer. Checking a map again, he discovered that Buckets of Stars Coffee had a place not too far from the office. For years he was happy heading there, racking up reward points and sucking down a giant, iced latte with skim milk, of course thinking the skim milk would save him some calories. Unfortunately, those calories were offset by what became an automatic response at the end of his order, adding a cookie or brownie. He didn’t pay attention to the price of things since the coffee shop app would just suck the money out of his bank account and reload the funds in the app. He also didn’t care because the important thing for Ben was getting out of the office.
Approaching the next light, Ben, still in reminiscing la-la-land, wasn’t paying attention to how long the light was green as he approached it. By the time he was half-noticing it, he started to speed up. The green light switched off, and the amber light signaled. Ben knew he would be risking a red light camera violation if he tried to speed through the intersection. Easing off the gas, he would have to wait through another red light cycle.
At the time, Buckets of Stars was fine for Ben, even though it was hurting his wallet and waistline. He would still snarf down his lunch in the car during the drive, much in the same way he would do when he would go for a walk at the park, mostly because he felt weird about bringing food into the coffee shop.
Early on, finding a spot to sit, have his coffee, and work on his laptop wasn’t too much of a challenge. He became friendly with the regulars, not knowing any of them by name, but familiar enough that they would give each other a daily, “Hello.” The regulars would also sometimes take up a little too much room, only making space when they would see one another come in so they could all get a seat, open their laptops, and not talk to each other.
Things were fine for Ben at Buckets of Stars until the new office park opened down the street. The lunchtime crowd swelled, the lines to get the latte and cookie took longer, and Ben noticed many of the regulars disappearing. Worse than that, he kept finding it difficult to get a spot to work. Frustrated by the popularity of the place, one day Ben did more map searching, finding another coffee shop around the corner from Buckets.
“God, I hope they are good,” he thought as he tried to visualize where they were while looking at the map. He did a little research and realized they were a locally-owned coffee shop. They appeared to be new since there were no online reviews yet, so, of course, in Ben’s head was now the thought of, “Great, I’m going to like them, but they’ll be out of business in a year.”
A gentle horn from the car behind him had Ben realize how much he was daydreaming about coffee shops. The left turn was made, and it was just another minute until Ben would get to his destination.
He swerved to miss some puddles on the road, on again, off again went the windshield wipers, and Ben turned into the strip mall.
He found a parking spot by the door, turned off the car, and was happy that he was close enough so that the umbrella he didn’t have wouldn’t be needed.
It was time for his “escape.”