You know it's about that time to skedaddle from your present job when you're listening to the Superfly soundtrack on a Monday morning. A little background here: I was working at a bakery and coffeehouse which shall remain nameless a few years back, when I was trying to make ends meet as a college student my second time around (at Boston University, whose unofficial motto is "We may not be Ivy League, but we sure do cost as much!"), pushing pastries for The Man. See, that's the Curtis Mayfield talking. The cool thing about working at a coffeehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts is that you keep the most interesting company, with the best taste in music, owing to the fact that coffeehouse employees tend to be artists of some sort, mostly musicians, in financial straits even more dire than that of a graduate student. Over the year and half that I worked the evening shift there, I got a fresh infusion of tunes added to my consciousness, including Curtis Mayfield's soundtrack to the 1972 blaxploitation flick "Superfly". Superfly inevitably ended up in a five-CD set of music we'd save for closing that we'd call our "Smash Whitey" mix - which also included Sly and the Family Stone's two-disc greatest hits collection, and two albums by an Icelandic pop sensation named Bubbi - a seemingly inexplicable addition unless you considered the fact that our bakers were all from Iceland - whose main claim to fame was as a folk balladeer but who had been experimenting with hip-hop in his latest records and actually sounded pretty good.

I loved working at the coffeehouse, and went from the front line to supervising the night shift in less than a year, but as time went on I became increasingly disillusioned with how management treated the rank and file. The hypocrisy was staggering - employees would routinely be fired without warning for infractions (like slipping a friend a free croissant) that the supervisors themselves committed openly, and god forbid if you were a woman with anything resembling a spine. One time a seventeen-year-old single mom was fired by the owner's crony and C.F.O. for "having an attitude", never mind that when she worked for me on the closing shift that I managed, she was a hard worker and never gave me trouble. The final straw however was a night that I closed the coffehouse and called the Fire Department because a clogged flue in the ovens caused a couple of our patrons to get dizzy and nauseous. The same jerk who couldn't handle a high school girl's "attitude" called me out onto the carpet for daring to close before he or the owner came to evaluate the situation. Never mind that we were all sitting on the curb wearing oxygen masks when he came to chastise me. I remember drinking about eight pints of Guinness that night, trying to understand the mind of someone more interested in that night's take than the health and safety of his customers and employees.

I quit about two weeks after that incident, without notice, mailing my keys along with an angry letter. I should have quit right there on the spot that awful night, but I didn't have the guts. I remember stewing every day I came into work after it happened, despite the fact that the owner was practically falling over himself to make sure I was "okay", once it got back to him what his jackass second-in-command said to me and the other shift workers. But it wasn't enough. A scale had tipped somewhere in the back of my mind, and it was time to go. I remember listening to Superfly vivdly during that two-week stretch between decision and action. It seemed the perfect soundtrack for my situation, albeit with butter instead of blow; and each time I heard it come around in the mix it goaded me more and more to do something, to get out of this once-beloved place I had grown to hate.

Well here I am again. Only this time I don't think I'll mail in my keys, but tell these people what I think to their faces. Should be fun.