The New Starbucks Era of the Office

When I go to Starbucks to work it is jammed. And not with the artists of old but the business people of new. People are obviously are working more and more from home and they don't want to work at home. I get that. Home is where the stress is. Home is where the quiet is. Home is where people aren't. The biggest thing people face working at home is there is no work buzz. There is no camaraderie. Starbucks solves these problems.

There is music. There are people. There is a buzz. And American business should think about this because offices have become morgues. The Internet killed the noise of the office. There used to be the ringing phones and people conversing, , meeting, talking. Not anymore. There is on the soft click of keyboards. People send emails to other people one cube over. This silence is not good for people who have to work.

I worked in an office once with a manager who could not stand noise. The office was a morgue. People hated coming in. People need noise. They need to feel like they are part of the whole or they feel like it is them against the world. Starbucks provides the buzz of old. People talk laugh cry yell work spill things. There is the sound of commerce. Corporate America should wake up and take a page out of Starbucks atmospherics.

Maybe they could even serve coffee. What a concept.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

God in the Coffee Houses

God is in the coffee houses now. Women and men sit around and talk theology and hope God will be for them. They are the divorced, newly divorced, the lost, the searching. They talk of God on a personal basis. HE will watch for me. HE will be here with me. But these people suppose the essence of God is someone like a friend in a coffee shop. The middle aged women recently spurned seem to lock on God first. They sit in the corners and discuss HIM as an entity that would save them. They talk theology and do gymnastics of interpretation. But in the winter gloom it is found wanting.

What if God is simply the dark? What if theology will not save you in the end? Is that so bad to be a spark in the night? Instead of this belief that the landscape of life will continue like a sequel set in some ether land. And I am not an atheist not even agnostic. But it is hard to listen to the tonic of old Biblical stories offered up as answers to interpersonal problems or existential angst. And the use of the heavy pronoun...I KNOW. Something about all this seems like a band aid.

And the clinging to this faith that someone else will solve your problems. The moony eyes, the expository declamations of faith and how it all works is so much BS. And these people sitting in coffee houses explaining to each other the meaning of God is a bit much sometimes. If faith is undefinable and spirituality a knowing...aren't these things best left unsaid?

And if it is only a great dark ocean waiting for us...wouldn't a good book be a better way to spend your time instead of blathering about things you have no clue about? Maybe a good CD of Joel Osteen to soothe your troubled soul?

Maybe not.

www.billhazelgrove.com

A clean well lit coffee house to write in

Rewriting is mind numbing. The same thing over and over and over. Four hundred some plus pages you climb over like a runner who just keeps going around the same track trying to improve their time just a little. Each time you start again you hope this might be the final lap, but there is always that nagging suspicion that one more time might be the charm. To pull this off without losing your mind requires boat loads of coffee, sweets, and lots of company and white noise. You have to trick your mind into not wandering off and never coming back. So you haunt every coffee house you can find.


The first coffee house works for a while until the Internet dies. They complain that their WIFI has been going in and out and of course when you are there it just up and dies. You need the Internet. Not for the rewriting but for the breaks to give your mind release. You need something to distract you between chapters and after eating lunch and caramel rolls and drinking coffee you feel it is time to go find somewhere with WIFI. You run down the street to a little dark coffee house run by a tough woman who gives you a hot chocolate. You plug in and start again. That's when you hear it.

You need background noise not the greatest hits of love songs from the Seventies. Afternoon Delight gets you off the chair to hunt down the tough Chicago woman who is reading The Inquirer behind the counter. Pardon me. But could you put on some classical music or jazz? The flat expression. NO. She goes back to the Inquirer. You sit down again to Mandy, It Don't Matter to Me, Have you Ever Been Mellow. That's it. You can't wall it out. Olivia Newton John doesn't belong in your novel. You unplug and give the tough broad from Chicago a dirty look and head out into the snow.

Starbucks. Ah, you know the menu. A good place to plug in. Consistent. You bust in, a man on a mission. Every table is taken. Worse the one table with an outlet is taken. You stare at the lone man drinking coffee by himself. You have an hour of battery time if only the sonofabitch would leave! No, you aren't ready to order yet thank you very much. You stand around and glare and glare. Nobody cares and nobody is giving up their table. Shite! You head back out and down the street. Desperate for a clean well lighted place to write in or at least a place with an open table.

You head into Cozi Cafe and find a corner table with an outlet. You plug in, order some really bad coffee. Sit down and begin again. Wifi works. There are sweet rolls. There are no people. It's as cold as a morgue, but you can work here. At least for a little while.

www.billhazelgrove.com/

Writing in Coffee Houses

The laptop freed writers from their storage rooms, basements, attics, garages, bedrooms, kitchens, studios, hovels, apartments, homes, tents and just about any place they could get a few scribbles in. Now a writer can join the larger world with  nothing more than an outlet to recharge as a requirement. And the effect on writing of no longer being in the Garrott of absolute silence: dilution probably for a more diluted culture. But maybe a breath for the writer who can just no longer take that grinding solitude that screams: YOU AREN'T WORKING HARD ENOUGH.

So out to the populace in a corner table and a cup of joe and some pastry. View not required. Corners preferred and outlets coveted. The writer takes his place among those who prefer hubub over the bone cracking silence of solitude. And so that novel short story essay poem now competes for the divided attention as two ladies armed with IPADS duel over kid photos or the minister IPADING and laptopping and texting in perfect holy tandem or the tattooed pierced couple deciphering online games or the teenagers teenaging with a million texts and hunched over giggles while Facebooking and twittering on the rocket fueled of double espressos with whipped cream toppings.

But the writer gives thanks. He or she is writing on the collective buzz. The quality is not so important as the act that is still being performed. No first drafts. That requires solitude, but rewriting can be done much the way driving is done automatically and with some detachment. But then comes the rub. Is the work suffering? Probably. But for some there could be no work without the buzz of unshackled camaraderie with others trying to sluff off the workaday world by hiding in  the last outposts of civilized life.  The coffee house.
Write on. 

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man will blast off this summer 

A Clean Well Lighted Coffee House to Write In

Rewriting is mind numbing. The same thing over and over and over. Four hundred some plus pages you climb over like a runner who just keeps going around the same track trying to improve their time just a little. Each time you start again you hope this might be the final lap, but there is always that nagging suspicion that one more time might be the charm. To pull this off without losing your mind requires boat loads of coffee, sweets, and lots of company and spurious noise. You have to trick your mind into not wandering off and never coming back. So you haunt every coffee house you can find.

The first coffee house works for a while until the Internet dies. They complain that their  WIFI has been going in and out and of course when you are there it just up and dies. You need the Internet. Not for the rewriting but for the breaks to give your mind release. You need something to distract you between chapters and after eating lunch and caramel rolls and drinking coffee you feel it is time to go find somewhere with WIFI. You run down the street to a little dark coffee house run by a tough woman who gives you a hot chocolate. You plug in and start again. That's when you hear it.

You need background noise not the greatest hits of love songs from the Seventies.  Afternoon Delight gets you off the chair to hunt down the tough Chicago woman who is reading The Inquirer behind the counter. Pardon me. But could you put on some classical music or jazz? The flat expression. NO. She goes back to the Inquirer. You sit down again to Mandy, It Don't Matter to Me, Have you Ever Been Mellow. That's it. You can't wall it out. Olivia  Newton John doesn't belong in your novel. You unplug and give the tough broad from Chicago a dirty look and head out into the snow.

Starbucks. Ah, you know the menu. A good place to plug in. Consistent. You bust in, a man on a mission. Every table is taken. Worse the one table with an outlet is taken. You stare at the lone man drinking coffee by himself. You have an hour of battery time if only the sonofabitch would leave! No, you aren't ready to order yet thank you very much. You stand around and glare and glare. Nobody cares and nobody is giving up their table. Shite! You head back out and down the street. Desperate for a clean well lighted place to write in or at least a place with an open table.

You head into Cozi Cafe and find a corner table with an outlet.  You plug in, order some really bad coffee. Sit down and begin again. Wifi works. There are sweet rolls. There are no people. It's as cold as a morgue, but you can work here. At least for a little while.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

The Permanent Unemployed of the coffee houses

As a writer I am in a lot of coffee houses and man you see them everywhere. The unemployed men you pick them out in a second. They are a lot of white guys with beards and goatees. Grey haired. They meet people in the coffee shops and talk in hushed voices. They read with the paper hiding their face. They meet at park benches and walk up and down the street with other men. They are the displaced work force of the Great Recession who will probably never go back to work. Like cattle they have been marginalized early in the ungracious retirement that is a massive economic realignment.

Call it what you will but the economy will become something else. It will become a cyber based green based machine that will be global in scope. It will move away from brick and mortar and the jobs offered will be different than those that exist today. The upheaval of the economy is a massive displacement of people and skill sets that have experienced sudden obsolescence. This is not a pause, this is a metamorphosis that will shed older workers like leaves that have grown brittle.

The young workers will fill the funnel first and then there might be some filling in. But middle aged white men will not be called up. There has been a fundamental shift in the tectonic plates of our everyday life and the slushy credit market that allowed companies to carry people in bloated management does not exist and will not exist again. That great run started by the greatest generation fizzled with the rise of China and the implosion of the derivative market. The funny money of twenty years vanished into the Monopoly board and left only the players...but without a game or money or properties worthless, the game is shelved for the new reality of  Don't Wake Daddy...because daddy has nowhere to go.

William Hazelgrove's new novel Rocket Man is due out in September. The story of a man who moves to the suburbs and loses his mind. www.billhazelgrove.com

The Wolves will come--our invisible unemployed

We will forget them. How long were you there? Twenty five years. Just like that. You? Fifteen years. Just like that. Did you notice how fast the day goes when you are unemployed? I'm not good at this. I just want a job. They are here again. The coffee house lost days of the unemployed. Me and them. We are all invisible now. Writers are always invisible, but now all these men are invisible too. Many will never return. The recession will end and they will not find purchase in this new economy.

The dirty secret. In this culture if you become old then you are done. Passed over for the younger employee. They are wandering around in my domain now. I have always been the inverse of the working man, haunting the coffee houses of midday with a laptop and a book. But now they are here. I can hear them now. How long have you been off. A year. A year and a half. Who is your headhunter? Can you get a job anywhere now? For a lot of people this is a new sensation. For the first time highly educated people have been made redundant. The best and the brightest of other generations are pounding the pavement. Could it be there are just too many people now?

Like the housing market we are awash in too much inventory. There are too many people looking for work. Who will employ these millions. College students join the ranks every day and they are young. They can give sweat and effort. What can the older experienced worker give in the new economy? We don't' really know. All we know is that there are so many people looking for positions that have dried up or have been eliminated. We have seen this before in the blue collar industries. People replaced by robots or factories closed and jobs shipped overseas. But now the people who always assumed they would have a job have been put out to pasture years ahead of retirement. The old economy died under them and they have no place to go.

Will our new cyber based green economy snatch up these people. Will our new energy efficient Juggernaut need all this old economy talent. Or have we created a cyber world where people are pushed aside with the click of a mouse. Can we have an economy that needs all those people skills or does that belong to a brick and mortar world gone by?

I don't have an answer and neither does anyone else right now. But they are here. And we will ignore them when it all starts up again. They will become invisible, members of the permanent unemployed. The Indians used to leave their older members behind on the prairie with wood for a fire and a blanket. When the wood burned out they would freeze to death. Then the wolves would come.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

And Here's To You Mrs. Robinson--end of the big suburban home

I have one word...just one word, Ben...plastics. This line by the pool of a large suburban home summed up the prosperity of an era or the mass consumption that Dustin Hoffman would rail against. The Graduate could be shot today by a pool in a large suburban home, but there would probably be For Sale sign in the front. The booming economy that produced those homes in the sixties seventies and eighties and nineties is gone and so is the dream of the big suburban home. Mrs. Robinson drinks from a large bar that spills out to a patio that spills out to a pool. Ben runs from one monster house to another.

Cut to 2009. The very people who now own those homes...one word, just one word Ben...cant find that one word anymore. What is the new thing? What is the plastics of our new era. It is not cars and it won' t be large suburban homes. Maybe ...solar panels...or hydrogen...or...fuel cell technology. Whatever it is the next generation will not be looking at large homes. For many reasons, but the biggest one will be that the banks will never make those loans again.

I'm sorry Mrs. Robinson but your debt to income ratio is out of whack. Mr. Robinson you don't have six months reserves and a job of two years with a W2 that shows you make two hundred and fifty thousand a year. I'm sorry Mrs. Robinson, but you don't have the twenty percent to put down. Mrs. Robinson, you were late on a credit card and your credit score dropped to 650...we only lend on 700. No, I'm sorry, we don't do stated income anymore or interest only loans.

The only reason big homes were able to be built in the first place was that the banks would give people loans on stated incomes and qualify them under teaser rates or adjustable rate mortgages that started out in the three percent range. Or the famous NO DOC loan that required nothing but a social security number and a FICO score. Then you could put Mrs. Robinson in her home. But not anymore.

Out where I live there are many large empty homes. I don't know what they will do with them. They will never sell. Why? Because middle class people will never qualify for them and whats more people don't' want them. The utilities alone on Mrs. Robinson house today runs a cool six hundred a month. And that's with Voice over IP. These are not energy efficient homes. They were not built that way. These monsters cost an arm and a leg to heat and cool and throw in that electric bill (do you know what it costs to keep Mrs. Robinson's pool warm?) and you are headed straight for the poor house.

Taxes. Nobody wants those taxes anymore. Out where I live (suburb of Chicago) taxes start around ten grand and on the big homes we are talking twenty four thousand dollars. That's a cool two grand a month without the mortgage. Don't forget maintenance and filling large homes with furniture Mrs. Robinson's home was magnificently appointed. The scuttlebutt among realtor's for a long time has been that a lot of the McMansions are empty. People would move in and didn't' have the money for the furniture. Many a cable guy has told me this story as well.

When the banks return to health they are going be loathe to make those jumbo loans. Only the truly rich will qualify and they probably won't want them either. All those spec homes you see out there are now owned by banks who got them from builders who couldn't make the note--that will be a painful reminder that they won't forget. So if your dream is to throw your money away on a house, then you better be hauling it in.

But the biggest reason is simply that the era of the big home is over. Conspicuous consumption has given everyone a nasty headache and culturally we have moved on. Greed is out and what was that thing called the American Dream? Maybe a big house won't make us happy. Green homes. Green cars. Waste not. Want not. We are truly moving into a different world.

So here's to you Mrs. Robinson...and Ben I have just one word...one word...downsize!
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
http://www.pantonnepress.com/chapter1.pdf

All The Sad Lonely Men of Starbucks

Market is up. Recession over. So who are all these men in Starbucks? I have been coming to coffee houses for many years to get a little release from writing. I usually shuffle in the afternoon to a Starbucks and flop down in an old wing chair and get lost in some Fitzgerald, Yates, Whitman...just anything to cool the brain cells. But lately, all the chairs are taken. And they aren't taking by women, they are taken by older men. Middle age dudes of the forty something fifty something variety. They sit in their comfort jeans trying to look inconspicuous. These men do not read fiction. They stare at newspapers or some jabber away at a laptop and some have the thirty yard death stare. They all have a deep look of shock and disbelief. When I first saw these men I thought maybe it was a fluke, but everyday they increased until yesterday the place was overrun. We might as well be sitting in a union hall. They look like they should all be in offices. You see the hands reaching for something to do, expressions trying to navigate the strange duplicity of sitting in a Starbucks in the middle of the afternoon when the rest of the world is working. They go to the bathrooms, order more coffee, sit with legs crossed staring intently at nothing. They just don't know what to do. In Britain they call them being made redundant. And there is that feeling that for a lot of these guys they are now redundant. They are of the middle management variety and that is something the new economy will not carry. The day passes and one by one they look at their watches and finally rise to put on their coats. The fact they have nowhere to go yells at you. I have lived a life of uncertainty as a writer, but you can tell these guys did not bargain for this. They are now redundant men, put out to pasture too early in a Starbucks in a small town: the sad lonely men of our time.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com