The Mind of TCHO

Last week, Emi and I shared TCHO with Chicagoans at the Yelp Around the World event. It was a huge success.

As we strolled the streets and sites, I was struck by the many textures of the city.

Thanks, Chicago, for the sensory delight.

I was never very good at sleeping late, even as a teenager (lo, two long years ago). I would try my hardest to stay in bed until two or three in the afternoon, but when I cracked my eyes open, ready to see the LED dot firmly in the PM position, I would see that it was still only 10:30 in the morning, and realize I’d wasted another Saturday morning waking up at a reasonable hour (though one’s definition of reasonable is entirely dependent on age).

Now, that’s not to say I ever enjoy waking up before noon. No indeed, waking up every morning for high school was constant tug of war between looking presentable and squeezing every possible minute of sleep out of the morning. The advantage of college is scheduling your own classes (for the most part), and after three years of college and more than twenty-four college courses, I’ve only had two start before 10AM.

When I think about the prospect of (a year from now) waking up at seven in the morning five days a week for forty years plus, a look of disgust firmly plants itself on my face. But this summer (knock on wood) I may be getting over this fear of endless identical days.

Depending on how old you are, you were probably an intern once upon a time. I have been an intern going on four summers now, for various companies and in various capacities. It’s hard to tell whether my increasing age or increasing interest in the places I work makes working more and more enjoyable, but either way I increasingly love these experiences.

I don’t claim to have a huge breadth of experience being an intern, having only worked in San Francisco for a few companies, but I have performed tasks as intern-y as they get: data entry, alphabetization, and errand running (though surprisingly, never coffee-getting until this week, and even then it was for fellow-intern Kaileen). I do know one thing with absolute certainty: if you love your job, you could be literally counting beans, and you’d still be having fun.

I’ll go ahead and shamelessly plug my previous employer, Electric Works Art Gallery, here in San Francisco. Yes, I was only working a few days a week, and maybe the long weekends made the job even more fun, but I was old enough (and my employers were young enough) that I actually connected with them, and even when setting up a new catalogue system for the artwork or getting through afternoons so hot the power went out, I had fun.

Other than loving your job, the most valuable thing you can hope to have as an intern is respect. It makes a world of difference when your boss(es) treat you like a person, as opposed to a student. Lately I’ve been very lucky in this aspect as well, though perhaps it’s less luck and more working for companies that are young themselves. The freedom I had last summer to write and this summer to innovate have allowed me to feel like a full employee of my respective employers.

As an intern here, in a given day I may be doing anything from engineering gift box design to writing stories about TCHO to tasting new batches of chocolate. Or I might do all of those things, or none of them. As a twenty-one year old who naturally still hates waking up early, knowing that every day at TCHO is pretty much completely different gives me energy to get up in the morning.

That said, I now operate on what I think of as an “old person’s schedule,” waking up at seven and going to bed at eleven. And my lingering threads of teenager sneer at me and say something snotty. But I can take that.

The only thing I can’t take is my newfound inability to sleep past nine in the morning on weekends. But soon enough I’ll be back at school, sleeping my weekends away when I should be doing homework. When I wake up then and see the clock firmly in the PM position, I’ll probably complain about how, once again, I’m wasting my Saturdays.

This month my wife and I went to Las Vegas for an Elvis wedding.  It was quite a spectacle, as Vegas tends to be.  First off, we flew Virgin America, which has to be, hands down, THE best airline in the US.  Talk about a model of the relentless pursuit of customer satisfaction.  Here we see the first-class cabin, which is like a nightclub, or, as someone else has pointed out, like being inside a lava lamp.

Of course, we checked out the sights, of which the Bellagio has many:

We also ate the “Rossini” at Burger Bar (Kobe beef topped with seared fois gras and truffles)

Which, magnanimously, automatically came with the famed dessert “Chocolate Burger,” which is a donut with chocolate ganache, strawberries, and a thin slice of mango made to resemble american cheese:

Artsy shot of Paris:

Blurry shot of Elvis (or is it just an apparition??)

Elvis’ pink caddy:

Working at a chocolate company and being the Director of Sourcing and Farmer Relations can make some days really fun with packages arriving from all over the world!  From a Wholesome Sweeteners News Letter, I played along with a contest to guess “Where in the World is Joo Hee”, a member of their QC Team.  I was close enough and won and received a really fantastic box of retail organic and fair trade sugar, molasses and honey, even a raw white honey, top quality baseball caps and even a wholesome sweeteners ‘fairtradesugars.biz’ Yo-Yo!.  This was great customer outreach and great customer service.

The day just kept getting better with some really nice cacao beans arriving from some great sources.

I can hear them grinding away in the lab and can’t wait to taste them!  - subect for a coming blog…

What excites me about our time is the ascendancy of personal, direct action to make a better world - as opposed to trying to seize the instruments of (top down) political power to effect abstract electoral “change.” We don’t need faraway hierarchical organizations, we have the self-organizing Net empowering individuals and groups to change attitudes and/or work directly on a problem or create new solutions. Which is why I love this ad (thanks and a tip of our hat to Shane Vella):