I admit ... I am a caffeine junkie. Without my mandatory dosage of several glasses of watered down Canadian coffee (in Europe and the Middle East I drank espresso shots), I find it very difficult to kick-start myself in the morning and to stay awake during the mid afternoon carb-assault (also known as the graveyard shift). Of course the other two reasons for taking frequent coffee breaks are (a) checking out the women loitering in the plus fifteens (for non-Calgarians, these are covered inter-building walkways and mezzanine floors that are lined with shops) and (b) getting out of my office, which, given how the powers-that-be react to the intensity of my vocal chord, is in an isolated corner where the sun doesn’t shine and my friend EH’s office acts as a sound muffler for the rest of the inhabitants (poor EH!). I should not forget to mention that even this well-conceived sound barrier fails miserably when I sneeze and objects that match the wide frequency of my nasal explosion reverberate for a good fifteen seconds from one end of the office to the other. Guzentite!
Back to coffee -- I prefer Tim’s. This is not me trying to convince Citizenship and Immigration Canada that I am adjusting to the local culture and putting more of my money behind local business. FYI, Canadians tend to think they own a business as long as their shareholding exceeds 2% and the company was started off by or bears the name of a famous Canadian. That put aside, I honestly like the freshly brewed coffee at Tim Horton’s. The trouble is that the queue at Tim’s is as long as the breadlines in Soviet-era Moscow, the glazed donuts on the shelves say “I would love to be teleported to your love-handles”, the servers are slow (and generally unattractive), and the odds of encountering a couple of demure good-looking women in the queue are worse than Canada’s chances of earning more gold in Beijing than Michael Phelps.
Some of my co-workers brew (what should not be called) coffee in the machine in the office kitchenette. Occasionally I will go and grab a cup of that stuff if I really need to stay awake at a boring meeting and it’s about to start in 30 seconds – which means that there’s not enough time to go downstairs to buy one. But one can drink rat poison only so many times before developing stomach cancer, or worse, losing one’s mojo, so I generally try not to consume the office-brewed concoction more than once per week. I did forget to mention that the office supplied coffee is free. I also forgot to mention that whoever is in charge of procuring the beans gets an annual bonus based on how many cents were saved per gram of coffee purchased.
In the end, for the other eight to ten coffee-breaks in a work-week, I am left to choose between Second Cup Coffee and Starbucks. Second Cup brews decent coffee, the staff do not exactly increase my testosterone secretion but nor can they be confused with krill-eating marine mammals, and their policy of not customizing fifteen different types of bagels with eight different types of condiments means that the queues are relatively fast-moving and short. Also at Second Cup I am not tempted by fattening sweets (theirs are disgusting), all the cups have the same-sized lid (they have a smart logistics manager who knows how to control SKUs), the medium-sized coffee is larger than Tim’s large cup, and the clientele is certainly more chic than Tim’s (I am talking about women).
But I struggle with monotony – especially with my hyperactive brain (if had I grown up in North America in this day and age, I have little doubt that I would be receiving multiple meds for ADHD and possibly even schizophrenia and bipolarity disorder). So even though Starbucks’ black coffee (which is the only stuff I drink) tastes like dog piss, I still end up going there occasionally. There are a few more reasons why I get coffee from Starbucks. I’ve observed that all the senior managers in my department drink Starbucks. Dog piss must be an acquired taste! When I don’t have time to sip my coffee in one of the +15 lounges, I intentionally buy Starbucks coffee so I can waltz into my office past the managers’ offices boldly holding the trademark white cup with the Starbucks monogram. Anyone who has watched an episode of “The Office” knows how important it is to copy the habits of your superiors, especially if you think of yourself as upwardly mobile. Another hint for the green – at your first meal with your boss you order whatever he or she orders!
Back to my coffee chronicles. Occasionally I will also visit Starbucks to sit at one of the super-comfy leather armchairs that are laid out on a spacious lounge next to some wall-to-ceiling windows that afford you a nice view of the riverside park and some of the buildings of Calgary’s scant Chinatown. When I am being especially cerebral (my work requires a certain degree of critical thinking) and need to come up with a devious scheme (I cannot state the purpose of it or else I’d have to kill you) I like sitting and gazing through these windows. This is part of my work routine – I am not slacking off. A few days ago while I sat on one of those sofas and peeked outside, I could see two very fine looking Asian babes being photographed by a homosexual gentleman. I do not mean to sound like a homophobe, but there was a lot of naughty touching and giggling between the two girls (that made me squirm in my seat) but no sign of excitement from the photographer. I bet he even told them what to wear (which I, as a photographer, struggle with when asked by female clients). I swear I am becoming near-sighted as I age because if my vision were perfect I would have read “Fook Mi” and “Fook Yu” on the girls’ matching t-shirts.
Comfy sofas and the sight of playful Asian babes aside, often I go to Starbucks to get a view of these two baristas – both beautiful young Rachel-wannabes in their early twenties. My friend EH initially thought it was the same girl but his notion was dispelled very quickly when we saw them in tandem. These are Caucasian versions of Fook Mi and Fook Yu and the main difference is that they are a little more horizontally endowed above the waist. Each of these girls has excellent merchandize for display and one of them prefers to throw her Starbucks apron over her unbuttoned black shirt. Every time she leans to pick up something, we men (and lesbian women amongst the clientele) are tilting our head sideways to get a better view. On returning to an upright position, occasionally one of the girls will give me the “I know I have great breasts but dirty old man, please look at my eyes -- they are beautiful too”-look. We (straight) men never get it why girls show off wholesome cleavage and then expect us to look at their eyes. I think it is their way of weeding out the gays from the perverts.
Starbucks often spells disaster too. There are occasions when none of my favorite baristas are there and instead the stations are manned by various combinations of three gay men. I am doing my best to refrain myself from describing these fine gentlemen in any derogatory way. I get enough crap from friends for not being as culturally aware and politically correct as the average North American gentleman.
The first of these three men is an Asian dude who is yet to shed generous quantities of baby fat but he still insists on wearing the tightest t-shirt that he can possibly squeeze his over-sized neck through – I bet he bought it from the girls’ section at Lulu Lemon. He wears an ear-ring in his right ear and has an impeccable hairdo. If a single strand of his grotesquely gelled hair rebelled against the direction it was brushed, you could tell this guy would discipline it with firm conviction.
The second guy is a six foot six stocky black man with short-cropped hair and a goatee. When he talks he shakes his head more than any Madrasi accountant I`ve come across but what really gives away his gayness is the thick layer of mascara around his big droopy eyes and his beautifully manicured nails. In my mind I was thinking, if this man giveth, Lord helpeth whoever that taketh!
The last of the threesome is a young lanky Indian man who wears a mohawk, fashions not one, not two, but half a dozen different earrings and tattoos, and one can tell that he frequently waxes the hair off his arm. If not for the mohawk, at about five foot three or four he`d be barely visible behind those machines that brew your Americano (somebody please explain to me what the hell an Americano is!). Did I mention the tips of the Mohawk were dyed blonde and that he wore four or five of those stringy friendship bands around his wrist?
I must say here that I have nothing against gay men except that I always feel that they give me this “you’re an ugly straight guy and I wouldn’t even ask for your number if you were gay”-look. I think they can tell that I probably have a tinge of homophobia – the same way that my wife MC and I can sense a tinge of racism every time we find ourselves amongst hicks in rural Alberta. I should add, if anything my wife MC is the real homophobe. The last time we met a visibly gay man at a party, she was about to kick his teeth in for photographing me from various angles every time she went off to powder her face!
A couple of days ago I asked my friends what prompted Starbucks to be such a gay-friendly employer. According to EH, any company that originated in Seattle and thrived in Vancouver was likely to be gay-friendly. My other friend JW thinks that any guy that describes a coffee as a Grande Latte for a living cannot be straight! I have my own views. Attractive women are indispensable for any establishment that charges three times as much for a shittier product (look at the hip downtown bars!). Having a combo of hot women and heterosexual guys in tight quarters (almost rubbing bodies as they pass each other) is just bad business judgment. There would be more spawning and less brewing!!! So hence get the cute girls and gay men to run a hip coffee shop.
Getting back to my coffee breaks, of late, the two female Starbucks baristas seem to have been promoted, because they spend more time in the office room with their backs turned towards me -- unless of course they are just tired of me staring at their breasts and have a camera hidden somewhere between my office and Starbucks to tell when I am coming. Either way, I am stuck with the three homosexuals.
But things are looking up. There’s new coffee in town. Between our building and the one immediately south, a dainty and remarkably cute Asian girl is serving coffee for a local hotel – and the best part is that a coffee is only one buck! She likes to converse and yesterday she was nagging on about how much she’d rather be on a golf course instead of being stuck at her station – and in my head I am thinking “Damn I’d like to give you some putting lessons – is your name ‘Fook Mi’ and do you have a twin sister?”!
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