The summer that Joshua Jackson realized he wasn't a morning person
Vancouver-born actor Joshua Jackson has played a sprawling range of roles including defence lawyer, restaurant owner, corner-store cashier, cruise ship doctor and — in this week's Audible Original Oracle: Murder at the Grandview — an FBI psychic hunting serial killers. But has the 47-year-old actor ever braved a regular job like the rest of us? We asked the Dawson's Creek star in this latest instalment of 'How I Spent My Summer.'
A lot of my summer jobs were on movie sets, but in between films, I had a few grinding short-term jobs. I was a grunt at a cement company, moving cement bags from one spot to another. I briefly worked at Subway, but my job at Starbucks was the briefest. I worked there for less than two weeks when I was 15.
I'd applied for a couple jobs, including one I really wanted at Rogers Video. They didn't give it to me and called me 'unqualified,' which was a bummer since I was in movies on their store shelves. That was a real hit to the ego and I was pretty desperate, so when Starbucks needed a person to open the store on Broadway in Vancouver, I applied there and got the job.
I was the person who opened the door at 5 o'clock in the morning – or was it 6? It was a long time ago – to a group of caffeine addicts. I wasn't the point-of-sale person, not even close. You don't even get to make the coffee at the beginning; you're just the prep guy who turns the machines on and moves boxes around. I kind of remember a brown uniform.
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It was me and some other poor schmuck having to deal with people probably at the worst point of their whole day. They haven't had coffee yet or maybe they're already late for work, and now they have to deal with two teenagers who don't know what they're doing. But worse than not knowing, we just didn't care. We didn't even want to give them what they wanted. It was the coffee shop in my neighbourhood so I knew some people who came in, but even then, it didn't matter. The coffee's not ready, it's brewing too slow, they need to get somewhere.
Maybe if I was a morning person, I'd have been better, but I wasn't. To be a non-morning person trying to serve a bunch of other non-morning people who need their first cup of coffee was just a personality mismatch. At that time in the morning, you should just want a cup of coffee. You shouldn't expect a teenager to make your double-half-caf-blah-blah-blah at 5 a.m. Nobody needs a 10-word coffee order. I had no patience for that and I wasn't empathetic either. Mother Teresa could have walked through that door at 6 o'clock in the morning and I would have been not happy to see her.
When I tell you I did not enjoy this job, I mean I did not enjoy this job. You shouldn't do morning-person things if you're not a morning person. Just don't. But at 15, I was probably making irresponsible choices and staying up late just the same. When you go to bed in the dark, and you wake up and it's still dark and you haven't had a cup of coffee, you're a monster. I get it now that I'm on the other side.
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Now that I have a kid, I can do morning-person things. I never loved anybody who walked into Starbucks as much as I love my daughter. For my daughter, I am a morning person. For Starbucks, I was not. They made a big mistake in hiring me but I solved that problem for them.
I probably knew I would have been fired soon, so I quit first. I just walked right out and never went back. That's what you're like when you're 15 or 16, and I didn't feel any kind of way about it either. I just wasn't there the next day. They were on a biweekly pay cycle, and I didn't even get my first paycheque.
Even then, I thought, 'I hate everything about this job and life is too short so I'm out.' As much as I didn't know what my contribution to humanity was going to be, I knew it wasn't that. They didn't even let me keep the shirt.
As told to Rosemary Counter
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