I love how places have signs that say, “We proudly serve Starbucks coffee.” Like it’s really difficult. I serve Starbucks coffee, and I live in an apartment where centipedes are a major voting bloc. Mostly they are concerned with building ramps so that handicapped centipedes can still have access to my toothbrush. They assert that they have the right to horrify me just as much as an abled centipede.
It doesn’t seem like you have to go through any sort of special training to serve Starbucks coffee. The quiz is basically:
1. Do you have money?
2. Can you go to Starbucks?
3. Can you find your way back here?
4. Great!
So why is it such a big fucking deal? And do you have the option for an alternate sticker, something like, “We regretfully serve Starbucks coffee”? “We serve Starbucks coffee. We’re fairly ambivalent about it because we’re mostly a cupcake place”?
And let me tell you, the whole pride part is not always lived up to.
I just made a cup of Starbucks coffee in a hotel room. Let’s not get too into it, but I brewed it straight into a cup that had orange lip marks around the rim, not because I picked up a prostitute with extremely bad taste in lipstick, but instead because I picked up my mistress, Munchies. You know, the snack where they emptied the garbage bag of floor sweepings from the Frito factory into those thin metal bags that Doritos come in?
Extremely hung over, I watched the watery coffee fill the cup half way before adjusting the “pod” that came in the room, not the normal sort of cup style plastic pod but a filter like a pillow case closed up at both ends and filled with coffee. I can’t fully explain it, but these always make me uncomfortable because they remind me of a feminine product. Like a tampon crossed with breast implant somehow.
So I adjusted the tampon/implant in the machine and filled the machine with a little more water from the goddamn bathroom sink. Then I watched as the cup filled and imagined picking it up and had to think about whether it was worse to drink from the side coated in orange dust or to drink from the opposite side and risk having an orange Dorito dust half circle on my forehead all day.
Suffice to say, there were a lot of feelings flying around the room at that moment. But pride was not at the top of the list.