On the ground
San Francisco, Day 1, 10AM-1PM
On the way to couchsurf in San Francisco, I get off the bus at Masonic Ave and Haight Street. The People’s Cafe* is across the street. Wanting a cup of tea and a place to pee, I walk in.
The logo door catches my eye.
“People’s Cafe: the place to be.”
Never in my eight years in New York City do I remember seeing such an open slogan. “The place to be.”
The slogan I chose for an organization in 2004 was: “Places to meet and be with people, and see a show.” Too abstract, too vague, too sexual, I was told.
Ah to relax in San Francisco, where being, at least in my first three hours, seems to have a bigger place in the culture than having.
A gal behind the counter sees my suitcase.
“What are you here for, or where are you from?” she asks.
What a wonderful question.
* * *
My couchsurfing host buzzes me into his apartment. He clears the coffeetable and sofa, gestures for me to sit, and wraps up his conference call about web development.
He’s very friendly and I like his style. When he asks me what I’ll be doing, I say I’m going to cowork at Citizen Space. He doesn’t understand the concept of coworking. He gives me a concerned look. “We have wi-fi here,” he says, as if he thinks I’m crazy to work somewhere else.
I try to explain the benefits, the features, while showing him the websites of Citizen Space, Jelly and cooBric.
As they say in some parts of Pennsylvania, no potato. Maybe you have to try coworking to get it, but I’m sure there’s got to be better ways to show people what it is with a few sentences or photos.
But something resonates with him.
“So you go to work on your own stuff,” he says.
* * *
On the way to the bus, another cafe sign catches my eye.
“My father taught me to work. He did not teach me to love it.” -A. Lincoln.
I wonder about Lincoln’s meaning and intention here.
On the bus ride to Citizen Space, a woman asks me if we’re near Union Square. I say I’m from out of town. Later, a man sitting next to me asks where I’m from. I say New York, he says his son is an architect in New York who just got a contract to build a 31-story building.
He asks me how old I am. I say 26. 36? he asks. 26, I say.
“You’ll live a long time,” he says. “You’ll live to the year 3000.”
He’s 70. He’s retired and loves to read, he says, holding his book on his lap.
He asks me what I do.
“Ethnography,” I say, ”how people interact.”
He asks if I’m a professor. I say I’m a consultant.
“Do you want to be a university professor?” he asks. I think about it.
“What I want,” I say carefully, “is to work with organizations, businesses, so people who work there make more choices about what they do and how they do it.”
* * *
Arriving at Citizen Space, I chat with Ivan and Ross. I search for an image of the People’s Cafe to put in this blog (*later I’ll find it).
The first website that comes up is Yelp.com.
Hey, I wonder whether there are similar review sites where people review the places they work — their coworking spaces and companies. I’d like to encourage people to write about the places they work in a way similar to how people write about coffee shops and bars.
It’ll be a good way to encourage people to start thinking about workplaces as self-determined.
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