life (Not) On Caffein

I confess to be an addict sort of person. I get hooked on things and then can't seem to break the habit. It's a little bit of the obsessive / compulsive that comes out in me all the time. One of my earliest addictions has been coffee.

I didn't start drinking coffee until around 1978, when I started working at my first job at Raytheon. I was an expediter, which meant I went around pushing people to do my product first before any other product was done. It was probably one of the worst jobs I ever held and I worked for one of the truly insane people in the world. Ed was a maniac. He would scream at people in the middle of the hall and have no qualms at all in making you look like you were an idiot. He would call you into his office and start throwing things against the walls. I learned early on to bring bad news to him in his office rather than in the hall and to make sure I brought him the bad news before he heard it from anyone else. It turned in to a good strategy because I was rarely embarrassed with the hallway beatings. In short order I needed a drug to help me through the day and that drug turned in to coffee.

It didn't help very much when my office was literally adjacent to the cafeteria. Any time I needed that little lift, I would step out approximately 50 paces and there would be the fresh coffee. For about two weeks I took it with cream and sugar, but that stopped when I realized I didn't really need the calories. Since then I have ranged between 2 to 3 cups of coffee a day for over thirty years. Let's leave my love for espresso out of this particular tome.

As the years have passed I find myself sleeping less soundly at night. I'm not the most easy going person in the world and I also tend be a little high strung. Last Thursday I finally switched to decaf. I found a decent bold blend from Starbucks (Veronna) and have been using it for the last week. The taste is reasonable and doesn't taste at all like decaf. I do notice a difference in the coffee jitters. I don't know if my sleeping has improved but I'm told it should also be good for my heart. Now if I could just stay awake at 3:00 in the afternoon.