So I got tagged by the most excellent Pacific Northwest Cheese Project blog for another meme floating around asking you to revisit your 23rd post.

The assignment is simple: Go to your 23rd post, reprint your 5th sentence, and expound. Forward to 5 other people.

So my very first post was New Year’s Eve of last year; I was still new at this. Post #23 was: Wanna Know The Grossest Thing I’ve Ever Seen? It’s good to know, as I approach my blogiversary, I’ve at least stayed consistent with tone.

The 5th sentence, “That’s the grossest thing I’ve ever seen!” was uttered by a less than charming shopper who at the time thought our partaking of raw cookie dough in her line of sight was disgusting and tantamount to the spreading of bird flu. I then proceed to make fun of her sheltered existence and review some wines, and coinkidinkally it was my birthday.

When I look back to those posts, still employed as a wine buyer, it’s so obvious–the quitting. I remember writing, thinking: Ooh, should I say that?. I had completely changed. Over-worked and under-fulfilled, I’d lost my edge. It took me 5 more months to realize that retail was an environment in which I was stagnating, not flourishing. As someone who grew up in the more Darwinian environment of bars and restaurants, retail was insufferable. And I never could learn to speak the native Passive-Aggressive tongue of these people. I felt like Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.

Restaurants are cut and dry. Expectations clear: People are coming. They are coming to eat and drink. They won’t be just looking. That would be weird. They won’t sit at a table, ask for bread and water, pick your brain about the wine list for 20 minutes and leave. People also don’t go to a nice restaurant looking for a $0.49 hamburger, and they don’t go to McDonald’s and complain about the food. Ex-pec-ta-tions.

But put people in a store they don’t understand (READ: they don’t have one in their local mall) and you don’t know if you’re going to get happy shopper, angry shopper, scared shopper, insecure shopper, jerk shopper, make-your-day shopper, gimmee gimmee shopper, stand-offish shopper, time-sucking shopper, flirting shopper, braggart shopper, etecetera, etecetera….and so on. You realize, some customers just don’t deserve your good service. (Taj, can I git a witness?)

So that’s my self-analysis of my little blog time capsule.

(*ed note:Holiday Heads Up: If someone helps you with cheese or wine selections all year long, or makes your coffee for you every day, show some love. That’s more than your mailman does for you, right? You do tip the mailman, don’t you? And being from Seattle is no excuse.)

People I am tagging, even though I don’t like to, but I’m afraid something bad might happen to me if I don’t:

The Cork and Demon - My South Texas smart ass wine friend

Bournemouth & Poole Math blog - Just to fuck with you all. I love math!

Patches - A blog? Debatable. But so freakin’ cute you won’t mind.

Pink is the New Blog - Sometimes some people need to be reminded how awesome they are.