Food for Thought

I have spent far too much time on this blog documenting my anger. If you read this on a regular basis, no doubt you think there is no fun or joy in my life and that simply is not true.

So, the drama at work continues to get more intense, but I'm beginning to think that the CEO is not going to leave, and if that happens I'm basically employed for life. I only need the job for the next 18 months, but having such an impressive force behind me is a good thing. On more than one occasion over the past three days he's gone out of his way to tell me that if he leaves, he will make some calls on my behalf. Since it seems everyone in the city of Chicago owes him a favor, I'm pretty much in good shape.

That said, I'm not one to sit around. I've spoken with three headhunters, and all three seemed eager for my paperwork. And today I went and looked at a restaurant that's for sale.

Right now it's a small coffee/sandwich shop. There is such a romantic feel about it, and looking around I knew exactly what needed to be done to make it successful. Right now, it's essentially a bare room with a few tables, but I could envision it full of bustle, servers pouring coffee and making babies giggle, cooks slinging eggs up on the shelf and fighting in Spanish. The owner had the radio on, but I would put in a sound system and play quirky jazz tunes. I could make it very successful.

There's a romance to the idea of that life. I loved running that little cafe a year and a half ago. I really did. I made up the menu and cleaned the toilets and fought with the cooks, but it was an easy, simple life. And in the summer months, with the front open and the customers sitting on the sidewalk chatting and enjoying themselves while I flipped through the New York Times...there was nothing better.

The problem is that very successful in cafe terms doesn't really translate into any real money. At the end of the day, I'd probably be living off tips with the rest of the revenue going to salaries and operating costs. The sad fact is that an independent business man cannot make a serious living running his own cafe. It's too cost prohibitive.

But that's not going to prevent me from doing some calculations to determine exactly how unprofitable it would be. Like buying a lottery ticket, I can dream of what might have been.