Convenience, Coffee & How We Use Our Time

My New Year’s Resolution – the one about time-management – is slowly taking hold. (Thank you, I know, it’s a tough one.) After washing today’s lunch dishes in record time (only one thing broken) I jumped onto the pc, leaving the wife to play zookeeper with the boys since that is her job. Then I started plowing through a dozen critical, mindless tasks: checking my e-mail for that inevitable offer of employment (if they want me bad enough then yes, they will contact me on a Saturday); promoting the Staten Island Film Festival on facebook (if Broccoli can get 16,000 fans, this shouldn’t be that hard); and shamelessly throwing my work at the latest ‘Look at what a great writer I am!’ website, among other things.

My powers of concentration, or maybe denial, are strong enough to get all this done even as the boys are shoving plastic train tracks in each others’ ear canals. When the bigger one sticks his thumbs in his little brother’s eye sockets, however, it’s time for me to take a break from my assault on the world and give my wife a break from the world’s assault on her.

She came back an hour later, the blood vessels in her forehead having receded. I told her to relax for a while longer, setting the stage for my permissioned escape to Dunkin Donuts.

Honestly, I was going to go to the library. I did go; rolled right up to the front door. But by now it was 3:30, and the laminated sheet on the door with their hours told me I’d have barely enough time to get settled at one of the desks, warm up my laptop and arrange my pile of notebooks (yes the paper kind) before I’d have to pack it all up again. Waste of time, that would be, so without hesitation or a trace of compunction I headed up the street to the only other place nearby where I knew I could sit down and plug in and work on my next novel.

Dunkin Donuts, bless their accommodating souls, is the subtle epitome of excess and waste. To wit: a few weeks ago I went out for doughnuts donuts with a bunch of family, and, one by one, everyone ordered – and everyone got his or her own donut in his or her own private brown paper bag. (This, perhaps, the result of an old woman who sued Dunkin Donuts for $15 million for allowing some of her husband’s Boston crème to get on her toasted coconut?) So we pushed two tables together and sat down and ate and ended up tossing eleven virtually unused brown paper bags in the trash. Or we would have if my wife hadn’t rescued most of them from the landfills of Rutherford so she could use them for snacks or hand puppets later on.

I hate waste. Whenever I go to the supermarket I try to remember to bring used plastic bags with me. Of course then they end up at the bottom of the cart under $113.45 worth of groceries, and by the time I’ve dug them out the cashier has rung up and bagged the first $80. But I try. At Dunkin Donuts their manic efficiency trumps my intentions, and barely before I’m done giving the 6’4” teenage man-boy my order a 5’4” teenage girl has appeared out of nowhere and is already slipping my custard-filled friend into a brown paper bag. Then I get my 20 oz. coffee – which I am going to drink right there in the same room – in a sturdy paper cup with a plastic lid that I swear was designed by NASA. Seriously, if an astronaut dropped this coffee it would likely make it through re-entry. Think I’m exaggerating? Maybe, but this plastic lid has a patent pending. It even says so – it’s molded right into the underside, beneath the cap’s removable accessory, which I will get to in a moment.

Ingenuity and invention made this country great; I am not knocking the power of creativity. And the features of this hyperbaric coffee cup top are undeniably handy. The flexible plastic arm is molded just right to snap into and out of the tiny oval through which your caffeine jolt flows. Not ready for a sip? Not to worry, not a drop of coffee nor a molecule of steam shall escape until your seatbelt is fastened and you are backing out of your parking space with one hand and one eye, your other eye and hand making sure your coffee is safe in its holder. For the less than plastic lid savvy, the word LIFT is molded into the tab at the end of this little plastic arm, form-fitting and snug to the contours of the lid so no one cuts a lip on any stray corners or edges and sues for $15 million.

Flip this arm up to drink your coffee and it totally gets in the way; you have to push it away with your nose (one hand is on the wheel, remember?) while trying to purse your lips over that tiny oval so you don’t spill on yourself, and if you hit a bump that arm can shoot right up a nostril ($10 million, easy). NASA’s coffee lid division has this covered though – you simply bend the arm back and snap the end onto the perfectly-shaped and sized convex knob at the far edge of the lid. You can find it in between the two molded arrows flanked by the molded, easy-to-follow instructions: ‘LOCK’.

I can hear the physics nerds grumbling. If that lid is on so tight, how do you account for the problem of air pressure-liquid displacement (or whatever the terms) when you drink? Good question, geeks, but your geeky compadres at NASA have it covered (that was a pun you geeks). Check the picture up there, you’ll notice that flexible arm has an extension, a larger interlocking modification to the original, simple round and flat coffee cup lid of yore. I couldn’t understand why that flexible arm had to be attached to the mother ship by this huge subliminally Batman-shaped clamp that takes up most of the lid space between the twin LOCK warnings and the all-American requisite ‘Caution Hot’ disclaimer (and a mysterious ‘16RCL’ – an alien-landing reference code maybe). Then I saw them: two microscopic chevron-shaped cuts in the plastic, one to let air into the core of the bat chamber, the other – located clear across on the opposite wing – to allow for air flow into the cup itself. If you ignore the ‘Caution Hot’ and suck your coffee down too fast the speed of the air entering and exiting the bat cave will create a whistling sound, eerily similar to the sound of a faraway police siren, which very effectively encourages you to find a place for your coffee other than in front of your eyes. And if you’re spooked enough to chuck your coffee onto the floor, no worries. That lid will hold long after you’ve gotten your license and registration back. (This assuming NASA has received the appropriate funding to develop a nano-gyroscope that will alert that robotic arm to snap itself shut.)

What a wonderful resume of technological achievement and lawsuit prevention we have.

To top it all off (another play on words you humorless geeks) Dunkin Donuts coffee cups sport a list of all the things that the efficient, tree-slaughtering folks behind the counter can put in that cup for you – sweeteners, among other things. Next to each possibility is an oval, to be filled in with a number two pencil so Joe’s coffee with Splenda doesn’t get mixed up with the coffee with Equal John asked for, or the coffee with Sweet ‘n Low Jane ordered. Fortunately none of them will end up with Jean’s coffee with sugar, those extra calories are killer.

It is 11pm, February 11. I am renewing my resolve to manage my time better. Tomorrow I am going to intervene in the basement before my wife starts screaming for an exorcist. Next trip to the Food King I’m going to throw my plastic bags at the cashier before she puts that first box of cereal through that beeping scanner thing. And on Monday, or whenever I can escape and get back to my novel, I’m going to intercept that stealthy little girl behind the counter before she wastes another brown paper bag or smartlid on me.

Or maybe I should really go nuts with the discipline and get to the library earlier.

Nah.