I pulled into my usual parking space this morning at 10:09. This is not an unusual time for me to get to work.

As I brewed a pot of tea, I realized that I was missing something.

In my hectic, young family with two kids suburban Bay Area life and my high-tech startup ultra-flexible schedule, I missed the traditional cycles of the workplace.

By "missed" I mean "noticed wasn't there" rather than "longed for".

I've never held a job with regular hours:

• Working as a shop hand in the family business was a 24/7 affair.
• Teriyaki take-out demanded late nights and a 12-hour shift on Sundays.
• Interlibrary loan in the university library involved weird hours that could be squished around class schedules.
• U-Haul in rural Washington State required early mornings and a hammer to unlock the fence gate that had frozen shut overnight.
• U-Haul in Mountain View, California, ate my soul like it was crispy bacon at way too freaking early in the morning.
• SLAC seduced me with the languid charms and womb-like security of academic bureaucracy, but only on a part-time basis.
• Contract tech-writing had me sneaking camerawork on the assembly floor at three in the morning.
• Full-time tech writing in Silicon Valley tempts you with the benefit of flexible hours and then knees you in the nards with fanciful development schedules.

Even so, I remember when 5 o'clock meant something. Like that damned Alan Jackson/Jimmy Buffett song "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere". God I hate Jimmy Buffett and his mediocre folk-country-pop music, his retinue of awkwardly aging, Hawaiian shirt and thong (flip-flop) wearing Parrothead fans, the mountains of cash that those bird-brains shower on him, his business empire whose machinery packages the Margaritaville state of mind, and his goddamned collection of personal aircraft.

I remember the sound of the roach coach horn at key times during the day. To a workforce sequestered in a warren of concrete tip-ups, you had few choices for lunch:

1. Fight the tide of frantic peers and spend half of your lunch hour fighting for a parking space, waiting in line, and driving back.
2. Patronize the little sandwich shop on the corner... again.
3. Pack your own lunch or eat leftovers.
4. Heed the raucous call of the roach coach.

We called them roach coaches, but the food they handed through those high Plexiglas windows was better than most of the prefab foodstuffs you could find nearby, if maybe a little greasy.

My first experience with a breakfast burrito was at a roach coach window. Lost my culinary cherry there. Bang. What an idea. A burrito? For breakfast? Burritos were dinner, not breakfast. Let me qualify that. My family's burritos were for dinner. We piled our burrito-sized tortillas with ground beef unadulterated by prepackaged "taco seasoning" (later we discovered shredded chicken in a thick cream cheese sauce), Rosarita refried beans, Tillamook cheddar, Lindsay olives, La Victoria red sauce, Knudsen sour cream, and iceberg lettuce. Not gourmet by a long shot but certified to knock your dick stiff. Only much later in life did I learn how too many gringos think a burrito contains only meat, beans, cheese, and sauce. Such a sadly circumscribed understanding of something that could be a tongue orgasm wrapped in a tortilla.

Speaking of sad, in high school, if you were old enough to be allowed off campus but not cool enough to own a car, you could walk down the street to Taco Bell instead of standing in line in the cafeteria with all the little kids. Somehow, I was cool enough to have a car and drove past Taco Bell for Lil' Pickle sandwiches all the time. Too bad really. The cafeteria windows were clustered in a circle under a bold and graceful tripoint dome that straddled the lunch area. Eating your lunch under or near that structure was an aesthetic experience. Now I'd pay to eat even a cafeteria bean burrito under that dome again, just for old times' sake.

But take a tortilla, steamy warm and pliant, and stuff it with eggs and sausage and bacon and grilled onions? Obscene. Like a pouting model spreading her pink on the glossy page. Obscene… and yet, compelling.

Now I'm valuable enough to have lunch catered every day.

I know it's a benefit. It saves me mad bux. It also means that I rarely leave the building at lunchtime.

Anyway, I don't hold any warmfuzzy nostalgia for those old workplace cycles. I know I'd chafe under the artificial schedule decried by the employing authority with no regard for life outside of work.

For example, my coworker mentioned a CEO she worked for who would cruise the cubes making note of who was in by a certain time just like a fussy old schoolmarm. No casual Fridays. No casual days ever. When another Silicon Valley giant swallowed the company and those lax, laid-back Silicon Valley ways became the norm, her former employees/serfs told the ex-CEO where to stick her schoolmarmy ways.

So, yay, I'm living in Paradise.

I guess I'm just getting old.

Pakeha

Columns by Pakeha