There’s a large, sectional couch in our backroom. It’s black and upholstered with some sort of faux leather, and I love it. I come in an hour early twice a week to sit crisscross-applesauce right in the corner where the two sections meet; I put this laptop on my lap and I start clicking away on these shopworn keys just so you can read blogs just like this one. But today is different—today, I’m going to give you a peek behind the curtains.

I’m sitting on that couch right now, typing, comfortably in my spot. I’m in a large warehouse festooned with posters and artwork; there’s a shelving system encircling the room and three standing-desks against the walls. The air smells like you’d expect it to in a dispensary, verdant and calming, and there’s a swamp-cooler chill in the air. My earbuds are in and I’m listening to the type of embarrassing music that makes you appreciate headphones. I’m eight sentences into this post, and every ten minutes or so, Savanna walks by and opens an enormous bag of marijuana under my nose so I can smell this or that new strain. The last bag was full of Kosher Kush, and as I sniffed it while sitting on this couch, I realized that life couldn’t get much better: I realized that dispensary life is the life for me.

But I also realized that outsiders such as yourself might think that it’s always like this. You know, like maybe dispensary life is all about sitting on a couch and listening to music while a smiling girl like Savanna holds piles of pot under your face. I’m sure there’re people out there who think that we just play all day, balling up handfuls of marijuana so we can have a summertime snowball fight, laughing and frolicking in slow-motion like kids at a slumber-party while cannabis rains down amongst us. Well, it’s not like that (I swear). Everyone here is a professional who works hard for this company, and for this particular post, I figured I’d give you a virtual tour—a virtual “meet the team,” if you will—to dispel the dispensary myth that we’re all just lazy stoners. So, here we go…

Sloane’s desk is right behind me. She scours the world of cultivation to find for our customers the best pot in Colorado, and she does a damn good job. Because of her, we always have fourteen different strains available for our customers on our menu. In case you’re wondering, that’s five Sativa strains, five Indica strains, a high CBD strain, caviar (aka “moonrocks”), and two different strains in our one-gram, pre-rolled joints. Sloane orders all our flower and she makes sure our budtenders know everything about it, from THC potency to the strain’s lineage, and I promise it’s a fulltime job requiring serious dedication.

Savanna’s desk is against the wall across the way; she’s our assistant compliance manager. True, she makes me sniff pot sometimes, but she spends most of her time making sure our practices are up to snuff with this state’s demanding litany of recreational marijuana regulations; she handles the stress and demand with grace. Sam’s desk is right next to Savanna’s, and he does his damnedest to make sure our inventory is spot on; I’m not going to go into the vagaries associated with his position, but trust me, it’s important to be a mental ninja to do Sam’s job; our inventory is a liquid thing, ebbing and flowing in time with the insane amount of demand this industry experiences. So, Sam’s job is a high-maintenance endeavor requiring an attention to detail bordering on the obsessive.

Joel and Brian share one of the offices in the hallway; these two men are a duo of visionaries. They own this company and they have plans, you know, like Pinky and the Brain kind of plans wherein world domination is the goal. We’re expanding because of them, but I’ll write about that later. Further down the hall, there’s an office full of ladies. Karen lives in there (she’s our accountant who makes sure the numbers jive). Her desk is right next to Ashley’s, our house council, who’s ready at any time to defend this business with her mightier-than-the-sword pen. Faith has a desk in there too; she’s our marketing guru, and she sits behind her computer with that confident smile of hers while deftly selling our services to Durango.

Zach’s room comes next—it’s the pre-weigh room, and he spends his days weighing out accurately the pot you buy when you walk in our door. I’m sure that sounds like a simple task, but each nug-jug he fills must come within one-fiftieth of a gram to be good enough for our customers, and exacting requirements like that demand a laudable level of efficiency. Libby and Melissa share the office to your right as soon as you walk in, and chances are that one of them has asked for your identification. Melissa is our community relations manager and she orders all our edibles and concentrates; she’s been here since the beginning. Libby orders all our pipes and bongs and she’s our floor manager; our shop looks the way it does thanks to her hard work.

And that leaves the floor: you’ll usually find Clay or me behind the counter. Clay is a pot wizard who can tell you everything there is to know about the marijuana you’re buying because he helps us grow it, and I’m the new guy who writes for you and smiles incessantly because I finally broke into the marijuana industry. Lastly, Mike and Chris run our off-site grow. These two men form a modern-day Abbott and Costello comedic team, but when it comes to growing and harvesting marijuana, they’re serious master-growers who deliver crop after crop of Durango’s best marijuana.

And there you have it: it takes fifteen, full-time professionals to keep this dispensary running seven days per week. We take our tasks seriously with pride—I swear to you that The Greenery is the best dispensary in Durango—and we work as hard as we can to earn the title we go by: your Best Buds.

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