The coffee idiot
February 24th, 2005
It’s Thursday morning at work and I’m tired so I decide to allow myself a coffee. Usually I stay away from caffeine as it’s a diuretic and I’m a stone former (or so I’m told), but I figure that a single cup or so per week is no great shakes. I spy a fresh pot under the percolator so I head over, pour myself a cup and look for the milk.
Now I like my coffee milky, but the first plastic pint I pick up has only a dash left in it. I empty this into my cup and get another pint from the fridge, only to find that this, too, contains a only splash. Adding this to my cup, I’m starting to think how unusual it is to finish off not just one, but two cartons of milk into a single coffee. And then I promote this idle thought to outright surprise when the third pint I fish from the fridge is almost empty too.
Who are all these people not finishing off the pints? Is the bottom 10% poison or something? Lord knows, but by this time I’m not thinking about the coffee anymore, but that it must be some kind of record to finish off by pure chance alone, three separate cartons of milk into just a single coffee. How improbable would that be? Can it ever have happened before?!
But there’s a problem.
The third pint contains slightly too much milk. If I use it up I’ll over-milk my coffee and ruin it. But I’ve come so far dammit! Will I ever get this chance again?
In it all goes, and I triumphantly lob the empty carton into the trash (3 points!).
2 minutes later, and you should imagine me sitting at my desk, trying to suppress a grimace as I force down the grey, tepid fluid.
I am an idiot.