Caribou Coffee Metaphor Rant... Monday September 7, 2009

So, yet again, it has been almost 2 months since I've updated this bastard. I've really become horrible at executing my personal goal of trying to capture the essence of the uneventful days of my life for later use in the shape of motivation to pursue more meaningful goals. Shame on me.

For today's entry, I'm deviating from my normal formulated approach of giving a play-by-play of the events chronicling my day. Instead, I am going to try something new. While I was sitting at work tonight, I was thinking about what working at Caribou Coffee meant to me from a personal and professional standpoint. I placed my opinion into a somewhat clever metaphor. Once said metaphor had been spoken, I immediately conjured up a second metaphor, followed by a third, and fourth, and so on. I started thinking that maybe I should write these down as one big rant to use for posterity and maybe to make someone else chuckle at the distaste I have for my current place of employment.

So, without further adieu, here is my list, starting with the initial metaphor that spawned the rest of them:


--Caribou Coffee, to me, is like the opening of a new roller coaster at the amusement park you visit every summer without fail, in my case, Six Flags: Great America. You get to the park and wait in line for hours, as it's a brand new ride and everyone is dying to experience it. After that illustrious wait in line watching annoying children play Planet of the Apes on the guard rails and watching disgusting couples engage in unnecessary amounts of P.D.A., you finally get to sit in the seat of this new ride. As you take off, you make it over the first drop, and it is less than satisfying. Not off to a good start. But you think to yourself that there is still about thirty seconds left in this ride, so it could get better. You go through the rest of the ride, hoping for something to push it to that "satisfying edge", and once you reach the end, you realize that it never got better. You exit the ride ultimately disappointed in yourself for wasting two hours of your day waiting in line for a mediocre and overall piss-poor excuse of a thrill ride. Here's the kicker: every year you return to said amusement park, your ultimate goal is to hit every single roller coaster in the joint. And even though you know it sucks some major asshole, you continue to wait in line for this piece of shit ride year after year with the same results presenting themselves at the ride's end. It's a vicious cycle at it's finest.


--Caribou Coffee is like that party you eventually get dragged to against your will, possibly on multiple occasions throughout your life. You're not feeling all that up to "going out", you're not exactly great friends with anyone who's going to be at this party, and, frankly, you can't stand a fuckin' scrotum sack who's hosting the shindig. The odds are playing against you and all signs point to an awful night. The problem? All, not just one or two, but ALL of your friends are attending and insist that you join them, leaving you with two options: Stay at home and pout by yourself, or bite the fuckin' bullet and go with your friends to this god awful party and hope that you can get plastered enough to have an alcohol-induced good time. All of your friends are excited and don't mind the large douche-mongrel of a host and cannot understand your bitterness towards the situation. You get to the party, your friends all ditch you to play beer pong, leaving you awkwardly conversing with old high school acquaintances, those of which you were never good friends with from the start. The beer from the keg is from the bottom of the barrel (most likely Keystone or Icehouse) and you can't refill your cup at a good pace due to the other assholes constantly crowding the keg. You are having a horrible time and are waiting for the cops to bust the place to give you an excuse to make your friends bomb out and take you home. The night goes way later than you'd like it to and your left with a horrible taste in your mouth that is the realization that you have to wake up in the morning with a hangover that does not live up to the events that helped create it.


--Caribou Coffee is like the leftovers in the fridge. You know they are there, yet you continue to ignore them because you just don't have a taste for it. The logical move would be to throw them out, but laziness sets in and you instead just move the leftovers to the back of the fridge so you won't have to look at them everyday and ultimately be reminded that you're a lazy bastard for not taking the 2 minutes to dispose of the waste. As the days (or in some instances, weeks) go by, you do a fairly good job of keeping your eyes off of the continuously rotting food in the back of your fridge. But every so often, you catch a glimpse of the decomposing leftovers and are reminded how disgusting you and the leftovers are. You finally get around to throwing the food away when it's accumulated so much mold that you can't even really tell what the original contents looked like pre-leftovers. Once disposed of, you feel rejuvenated and better about yourself for conquering what you should have conquered a month ago. Until the next batch of unwanted leftovers...