What Would Thoreau Do?

So I started a new job two days ago. I should be excited to bring in money. Especially with the holiday season here and my son truly wanting Santa to come this year. I should feel grateful for the little bit of extra cash to give him a good Christmas. Alas, I am not satisfied. After day two, less than a whopping twenty hours of work, I am so bored. Even more than that, I am disappointed that I am bored.
This is not a soul feeling, purpose finding job. I am strictly making money. But somehow I hoped to find a bit of purpose. I do realize that I have plenty of opportunity to affect the lives of the people I come into contact with daily, regardless of how menial the task that I am doing while connecting with those people is. On the same hand, I like for my motions, my physical and mental abilities to be in good use when I work. It turns out that most of the action required for this service industry position is pressing buttons.
I'm old school when it comes to making coffee. I want to feel the weight and pull of the espresso grinder. I want to hear the thud of dumping the used grounds out, the steamer skipping in the milk at my control. It's a small job, but those are the things I love. I love the meat, the grime of doing it myself. Now all I do is press a button.
In college I developed an appreciation of a Thoreau attitude towards industrialism. But I thought I would grow out of my passionate feelings about the world moving much too fast. Especially after moving to Texas, the epitome of materialism and industry. I am thankful for this job in realizing that I have not lost my passion for wanting a human aspect to working for a company.
One could argue that the machine doing all this on it's own allows more room for personal connection with the customers. But I have worked for an independent coffee company and connected in the very same way that I am now. Maybe even better because I am not so dulled by pressing buttons. I think that productivity comes first in a business like the one I work for even though they may not believe it. Efficiency. I think it develops a huge distrust with your employees to allow a machine to do all the work. Yes, it may be more efficient or consistent, but then again it may not. It may just be that trusting your employees to do some of the work develops a more meaningful way to pass the time, more of a feeling of accomplishment.
I don't want to be mistaken, whether hands on or not, it's definitely not the most important job in the world. I get that. At either spot I still desired more interaction with my brain. So there's that. But I also want to know that somewhere way up high in the corporate kingdom someone trusts me to pull my own shot of espresso and hand it to a customer knowing that I did it myself. That I am capable of doing this. I am not a useless human being that doesn't have a working brain. I think it's really important to be valued. Who knows where these feelings might take me. Once again it may be somewhere far away from employment.