Let’s get WORKING! The first piece in Fringe’s themed issue – Working – is Someone Else’s Ivy, an essay close to my heart. This is not so simply because I published it, but because I have lived the life she writes about: food service. You needn’t have swirled whipped cream on someone’s mocha before to appreciate the description of the job, though. In fact, you don’t even need to have customer service experience. All you need is to want to be able to do your job the way you know the job should be done. That is, not necessarily how your boss wants it done. Amy Clark’s tale of a worker’s revolt is the stuff dreams are made of.

For a long time, when asked what profession I was in, I would reply by saying that I was a professional milk steamer. I worked behind the counter at a small café in Harvard Square, Cambridge, in the shadow of the most prestigious university in the nation. For some reason, the morning shift was often slow, so the other employees and I would kill time telling stories. Like the one about the store being owned by the mob, which would explain how the company could afford to pay two employees seven... more »