Coffee Drinkers

I bear some amount of hostility towards coffee drinkers. Especially those I see hanging around the coffee room in the morning, waiting for the coffee pot to flower and bear fruit with that smug-cum-self-pitying look on their faces. These coffee martyrs will then tell anyone who is willing to listen that they just can't get any work done unless they inject some of that coffee into their systems first.

As a model employee of my company, I don't like this kind of talk in principle. My view is, coffee or no coffee, one should work hard, one should be productive and one should contribute to the global economy which really needs all the help it can get right now. And coffee, by the way, is a relatively new invention. If it really were impossible for humans to work without coffee, we would never have discovered coffee in the first place. All we would have done was to lie around on the floor of our cave groaning about the lack of coffee in our lives, yelling for someone to get the fuck out and invent some coffee for us, preferably mocha white chocolate with that hip brown-colored sugar. And then, we would have added by way of explanation that we would have gone out and done all the inventing ourselves but we really needed to get some coffee into our systems first.

But why give special treatment to coffee? What about the other substances of abuse such as alcohol or baby powder? How about my domestic policy of not operating unless I'm drunk? Do you hear me complaining that I can't work without any alcohol in my system?

So the other day while driving to work, I saw a couple of coffee drinkers emerging out of a Dunkin Donuts and crossing the street. Dunkin Donuts drinkers are even worse than ordinary coffee drinkers. 'Cause not only do they need a coffee fix before they start spreading joy into other people's lives, but they specifically need a Dunkin Donuts coffee fix. No, nothing else will do. They are similar to Starbucks drinkers, except poorer. Such people need to go into rehab. A life such as theirs isn't worth living. So I swerved my car towards them to rid them of their miserable existence.

But then one of them put out his hand in front of the other who wasn't paying attention, probably 'cause he didn't have any coffee in his system, to warn him of oncoming death in the form of me. The sight of this coffee drinker sacrificing his hand to the cause of a fellow coffee drinker, probably the same hand he usually employs to shove coffee inside his body, brought tears to my eyes. It was a beautiful selfless gesture, one that wouldn't have been particularly noteworthy if it had been just an ordinary person, but this was a coffee drinker for chrissake. It reminded me that coffee drinkers are also people and have feelings and emotions and their blood, though highly caffeinated, also flows red on being hit by a car, just like yours and mine.

This sentimentality lasted till I reached my office where I was informed by a colleague that he couldn't work till he had some coffee in his system.