starbucks is not a good place for a conference call

Remember what heaven it used to be to work from home? The relief that a day or two out of the office provided from ringing phones, chit-chatting colleagues and impromptu meetings, enabling you to actually get something done? All of the complex white papers and business plans I’ve ever produced have spent time spread across my dining room table or stacked as carefully sorted piles of research on my living room floor.

Unfortunately, that amazing boost in productivity and focus…well, once you relocate your office to your home address, it lasts about a week. Then the quiet truly settles in and you find yourself incredibly nostalgic for the opportunity to waste some time in the employee break room while getting another cup of coffee.

That’s why the good folks in Seattle invented Starbucks.

I was admittedly late to the Starbucks party. The reason was simple: Although I like employee break rooms, I don’t like coffee. Don’t like how it tastes. Don’t like how it smells (too much time spent as a busboy during my formative years). Don’t understand why anyone would pay $4 a cup to drink it. With all due apologies to Patrick Henry, give me Diet Pepsi or give me death.

Then a couple of years ago the company I was working for had the opportunity to pitch Starbucks on our new technology. Panic ensued. As the head of marketing, I was responsible for creating custom content showing how our products would fit in the Starbucks environment. Of course, having never set foot in a Starbucks I had absolutely no idea what their environment was like. So I set out to spend four hours a day in one of their coffee shops every day for a month.

At first I felt tremendous guilt. Anyone who’s ever spent time around restaurant people is well aware of the importance of table turns. Could a couple of Venti Green Tea Lemonades (sweet) really buy me a seat for a full afternoon?

I soon realized that my beverage of choice didn’t just buy me a table – it bought me an entire office. Looking around I could see people holding team project meetings, working on volunteer committees, even conducting job interviews. I quickly came to recognize the regulars who – like me – came in almost every day, booted up their laptops and got down to business. I even ran into someone from my office using a Starbucks as his office while we were both out-of-town on unrelated work trips.

Starbucks likes to talk about their restaurants as a “third place” for their patrons – another space we live in, another space where we find community beyond home and work. And, truth be told, I could have pretty much moved right on in to my neighborhood Starbucks if it weren’t for one thing: the music. No sooner had I settled in to my routine than they went and switched their background tape. The new sound? Sea shanties.

Really, really loud sea shanties.

I may have learned quite a bit about Starbucks while we were attempting to sell them software but I still don’t know why they decided to get all nautical with their featured music selections that fall. I do know I heard “Is that pirate music?” pretty much every time I answered my mobile phone. (Pay no attention to me, folks. I’ve just decided to set up my office on a Pirates of the Caribbean ride.)

Today when I’m desperate for people, noise, distraction and the smell of someone else’s coffee, I still head on over to Starbucks to work for a few hours. It’s the ideal replacement for the office (or at least the office break room) – as long as I don’t have any conference calls scheduled.

Oh, and as for the Starbucks sales pitch? Well, they didn’t buy the software but they did bring us coffee.