I work in a submarine. Technically it’s a drive-thru-only Starbucks in Tacoma, but it is very small and sometimes has eight or more people stuffed inside with two espresso bars, ovens, refrigerators, sinks, blenders, ice bins, drive-thru equipment, and several hundred beverages trying to happen at once. So, submarine.

During Peak the whole thing runs like a machine. Starbucks measures speed in seconds, and for a while every morning it seems like everyone in Tacoma remembers at exactly the same time that they want coffee. There are people on espresso bars, cold beverages, warming, drive-thru, handoff, support, and someone supervising the whole thing. Everybody has a job, everybody has to know their job, and the goal is pretty simple: get a cup of coffee into the customer’s hand.

It reminds me a little of live sports production, which I did for years, although the comparison isn’t exact. In broadcast everyone was planted. Camera people stayed on camera, replay stayed on replay, audio stayed on audio. If somebody wandered away, their shot didn’t get on screen. Goal missed. Pun intended.

I was usually one of the weird people wearing multiple headphones, quite literally. One headset carried the production chatter between the crew and the other carried the livestream, which was about thirty seconds behind reality. I didn’t pay much attention to the words on the stream because hearing the same event thirty seconds apart would make my brain explode, I was listening for bad levels, weird echoes, or anything else going wrong. If I heard something, I’d tell the audio tech over comms. Usually they had already fixed it by the time I said anything. That was good. It meant everyone knew their part.

Starbucks is more fluid. During Peak I’m usually planted too, often doing almost nothing except saying “Welcome to Starbucks! What can we get going for you?” over and over again. Weirdly, I like it. Every order is almost the same, but just different enough to give my brain a little dopamine snack. Or I’m at the window talking to regulars, which I like even more. At night, though, I’m the supervisor and I need to know what is happening everywhere. Well, actually, that’s a lie. I specifically built a system so I don’t have to know what is happening everywhere.

When I started training to be a Shift Supervisor I realized immediately that there was no universe in which I was going to remember all the shit I was supposed to remember, so I started putting everything into the Reminders app on my iPhone. Every new responsibility became a reminder. Every time I forgot something, that became a reminder too. Eventually Starbucks completely colonized the app and I could barely use it to remind myself to buy groceries. I moved everything to Things, which created its own special kind of chaos, and eventually exported that mess and turned it into a spreadsheet I can ask ChatGPT about while I’m working.

The baristas mostly just see me staring at my phone and mumbling “done, done, done and done.” They don’t need the map. I do. Most nights they’re already a few steps ahead of me anyway. The map exists entirely for my benefit, to make sure I didn’t have a brain fart and leave the money sitting on the counter. Again.

Money and I do not get along. Once I left a pile of twenties sitting on the cash scale. Nothing happened to me, although my boss and I had a very necessary conversation. I walked out afterward and another supervisor said something like, “Well, it’s only six months. That’ll go by fast.” I said, “What?” She explained that leaving money out was a write-up and I wouldn’t be eligible for promotion for six months afterward. I didn’t really know how to respond because I had not, in fact, been written up, though I probably should have been.

That wasn’t the only time. I’ve left money sitting in the intake feeder of the automatic safe because I forgot to actually run the deposit. I’ve left tips on the counter. I’ve left money in drop boxes up front. It’s like money doesn’t exist, man. So now one of the closing tasks in my giant system is essentially MONEY IN SAFE — TRIPLE CHECK. I know how money works, I just occasionally forget that it continues to physically exist after I’m emotionally finished dealing with it.

Most of the rest of the system is just there to make sure the machine keeps rolling. If the pastries weren’t rotated earlier in the day, I inherit that task. I understand why it happens and I’m not going to get mad about it, but now something that should have been a check becomes something I have to do myself. Same with cleaning bars, stocking milk, doing pulls, filling things, emptying things, counting things. The goal of the Starbucks machine is still that cup of coffee in the customer’s hand, but the close is part of making that cup too. If we do a good close, the next crew can come in and start producing without first repairing what we left behind.

That’s what a team does. Everyone has a thing they’re good at, hopefully because they enjoy doing it. I don’t need to like everyone I work with, but I do need to respect them. If somebody can do one thing really well and knows how to do it, I respect that. They don’t have to be good at everything. If they’re still learning, that’s fine too. I don’t care how long it takes as long as I can see progress. I’ve worked with people who picked things up immediately and people who took a while and then suddenly everything clicked.

One of my favorite people to work with is Lauren. She hates being at the window and loves tasking, so if I come in and she’s stuck there she’ll sometimes just look at me and mouth, “get me out of the window.” I do, and then she cleans, stocks, preps, and generally makes the rest of the night easier for everybody. One night I started saying, “Lauren, can you bring out more…” and she walked around the corner already holding lemonade with a giant smile on her face. “…lemonade?” Duh. I should have known.

That is probably my favorite thing about a good team. Sometimes it’s silence and sometimes it’s chatter, but the thing that disappears is work talk. Nobody has to keep asking what happens next because everybody knows. The work is happening in the background while we talk about something stupid, or nobody talks at all and we just tuck in and get it done.

I’ve felt the same thing in creative work. Casey Catherwood and I worked especially well together because we spoke the same strange comedy language. He would come in with some crazy idea and basically say, “we’re shooting this today,” and we would. I’d have to figure out how to make it happen quickly, we’d grab what we needed, go somewhere and make the rest up along the way. It always reminded me of jazz musicians. Everyone knows their instrument, then somebody throws something weird into the middle and everybody starts playing off one another. Something can be complicated, creative and completely stupid all at the same time.

My brain glows in that environment. Making something for somebody else means I get to spend some time inhabiting their brain. I have to understand what they think is funny, what matters to them, how they see themselves, and what they’re trying to say. I was never as good at finding a story in footage somebody else shot because I wanted to have been there. I wanted to know what the room felt like. I wanted to know which joke was actually funny because I watched the person laugh at it.

That’s what happened in 2013 when I spent several days in San Francisco following Tom Ortega and the Omega Ortega crew through Salesforce’s million-dollar Dreamforce Hackathon. Maurice and I recorded constantly. He also wandered around San Francisco shooting tons of B-roll while I stayed closer to the team. By the time I sat down to edit, I already knew the story because I had just lived it with them. I wasn’t trying to figure out what happened, I was trying to figure out how to tell it.

Originally I built it in pieces, Part One, Part Two, Part Three, leading the audience through the week as we had experienced it. There’s an old email where Tom asked me to go back and add a time counter to Part One after I’d already moved on and I told him, “It’ll be like Jabba the Hut showing up in Episode IV in the 90s.” I remain proud of that email.

The funny thing is, they lost the hackathon, but that was also kind of the point. Chris Eggleston says almost immediately that they did hackathons because they were fun, because they sparked creativity, and because they helped them build relationships with companies they otherwise might not have reached. Of course they wanted the million dollars, but that wasn’t really the center of the story.

Tom understood the team part of it especially well. In the middle of the hackathon he took everybody out for sushi. Not a quick sandwich at the computer, either. We walked there together, sat around a huge table, and slowly ate. Tom grabbed the menu and started pointing: everything on this page, everything on that page, two of those. His philosophy was that if everybody had been grinding for days, eventually they needed to stop, eat something good, talk about something other than work, laugh, and then go back refreshed.

At the end the server brought little glasses of Fernet-Branca. I was apparently the only person dumb enough to drink mine. I took a sip and said, “It tastes like Grandpa!” Everyone lost it. Then, because apparently one bad decision wasn’t enough, I drank several of the others too since nobody wanted theirs. Then we walked back and went to work.

They knew the rhythm.

By the time they lost, the movie had already told you what mattered. Tom eventually says it outright: their goal wasn’t really to win, it was to become a better team. They had. That’s why the ending worked without me having to manufacture some inspirational lesson out of losing.

I was reminded of that crew again recently, and then Tom appeared with a comment that simply said, “We will all be united again. Watch. ;)”

I’m not going to explain that yet.

But I smiled.

There are people you work with where, years later, you can still remember the rhythm immediately. The jokes, the shorthand, the strange little machine you became together. Sometimes those machines disappear. Sometimes, maybe, somebody plugs one back in.

For now I’m still in the submarine. I’ll look at my phone, mumble “done, done, done and done,” discover somebody already did the thing I was about to ask them to do, talk shit with a coworker, hand coffee to a regular, and triple-check that the money has not disappeared into another dimension. Eventually I’ll lock the door, get into my car, and finally feel the thing I always feel after a good close.

Peace.