Smells like coffee, tastes like shit

Due to a disgusting cough brought on by this disgustingly cold Melbourne weather, I found myself taking the day off from work and seated in a café eating breakfast. I did my obligatory ‘I’m sitting alone in a café’ freak out where I endlessly tinker on my phone including reading a page of an iBook then finally succumbing to checking Facebook instead, rummage around in my bag for ‘something important’ (ie. Tictacs), and do any other possible activity to look busy to onlookers only to realise that no one really cares. I also did my obligatory coffee spill after I decided to ‘shot’ my cough syrup because despite my age it still tastes gross and follow it with a ‘chaser’ of hot coffee. ‘Hot’ being the key word. I ended up with half of my coffee on my pants/table – the 3 year old playing on an iPhone next to me looked over and gave me a totally disgusted expression of ‘Dude I’m 3 years old and don’t have hand-eye coordination yet and still my table is cleaner than yours, what’s wrong with you? Get it together lady’ then she went back to drinking her babychino [As an aside, possibly the ONLY reason I would have children would be so that I could order a babychino. I love frothy milk in a small cup. I’d probably order the babychino for me and then pass the latte onto the foetus-child…ergh! Thinking about that foetus-child makes me want to still vom that babychino though].

Anyway something weird did happen – my local café happens to be near to a few standard Melbourne private schools. Given it was still a school day, I was shocked that at about 9.45am I found that the café was suddenly filled with school kids ordering these large-cup coffees. I jokingly said to one of them “wow that’s a large coffee” only to initially cop a look of “get away from me crazy, coffee-spilling, coughing lady” followed by the response of “yeah I’m just so tired”….yep evidently life is tough when your day consists of about 5 hours of actual concentration.

But I’ve seen this before too. Person comes into work throwing around phrases like “getting slammed”, “so busy”, “bit jammed today”, “was here all night”, presumably to indicate to the rest of the work place that they were working harder and later than anyone else. They then say “I need a BIG coffee today to just get through the day”. This implies that because of the aforementioned nights of hard work, this person needs more than the usual amount of caffeine to function during the day. So they arrive back with this coffee in a large cup. But what I don’t get is how they are drinking more coffee to stay awake? By getting these KFC 20 piece feed bucket sized coffees aren’t they just getting more milk? More nice, warm milk that will probably warm the cockles of their heart, feel like they are getting a nice big cuddle from Big Ted and send them soundly to sleep at their desk? They might as well order a fucking ‘large’ babychino, get someone to burp them then go to bed.

Then of course there are the small coffee drinkers who recognise that fact that more milk lowers the coffee concentration and require small shots of caffeine to get them through their day. But I can’t help but think that these small-cup coffee drinkers are subject to another interesting relationship – that is the inverse correlation between size of coffee cup to wankiness: the smaller the cup the larger the wanker you are. They ‘tisk tisk’ at you when you say you drink Nespresso and probably just lectured you on how they were up to 2, nay 3, nay 4am working, so apparently the whole world should stop, given them a synchronised, sympathetic “awwww” and let them skip ahead of you in the line. This is probably a bit harsh but if I were a barista and someone asked for a “double ristretto with ¾ sugar and a dash of milk”…then…hmmm let’s just say I’d be very tempted to do a ‘true ristretto’ using rare South-East Asian possum poo…and maybe let’s just say I’d maybe substitute that rare South-East Asian possum poo for street dog crap and use the saliva of said street dog for that ‘dash of milk’. At least that’s still technically ‘single origin’.

Anyway I shouldn’t really talk. It’s not like I’m some coffee connoisseur. In fact I’m probably the worst Melburnian because I don’t really drink/like coffee and I actually only started drinking coffee in my second year of investment banking. Yep that’s right, second year…because in my first year I thought I was only allowed to leave my desk to go to the toilet. To be honest, I can’t really tell the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ coffee, I just nod in agreement when someone else makes the comment. Yep I’m a total coffee-snob poser. But at least I’m not as bad as coffee snobs in America. It always baffled me how in ‘Gilmore Girls’ they would both speak really fast, speak really fast some more, make some reference to pop culture really fast, then say “wow this is really good coffee”…but it’s just hot water poured on granulated coffee isn’t it? How could you get ‘good’ or ‘bad’ versions of that? I don’t get it.

In my opinion it’s total madness and to be quite honest I’d be pretty happy if just got a cup of warm, frothy milk…an Adultichino. I also wouldn’t mind a nap after that instead of working.

After thought – Coffee beans look like pellet poo: