Thursday, May 20, 2004

important information for those readers who sometimes train baristas

Yesterday, I was in the coffeeshop at Borders, and I ordered what has become my usual hot-chocolate-with-skim-milk-but-with-whipped-cream.* The barista made the common mistake when putting on the whipped cream, which is to fancy oneself as crafting the topping for a sundae instead for a hot beverage. So the whipped cream is piled like a half inch above the top of the cup.

As I was planning on walking around the store with the drink, I wanted to put a lid on the top. But since the total volume of the beverage was now greater than the total volume of the cup, a lid wouldn't fit. The usual solution would be to sip some from the top, but, as the surface of the beverage was buried under however many inches of Reddi-Whip, I couldn't do this without getting whipped cream all over my face in the process.

So I tried to defy physics by putting the lip on the cup anyway. As is the usual fate of efforts to defy physics, this didn't work. Instead, hot chocolate came spurting out of the hole in the lid and splattering my shirt with all these brown specks, like I had just ambled through some finely-sprayed fecal mist. Luckily, the book I had set down next to the cup was shrink-wrapped, as hot chocolate spilled all over it. Many napkins were required to staunch the cocoa flow.

* As some readers know, I cannot abide the taste of coffee or anything coffee flavored, but otherwise much enjoy coffeehouses.

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