Lazy Tuesday

We stayed up much too late last night, which meant that today was an utter struggle from start to finish. I crawled out of bed at seven, bumped around the flat and then rushed off to work for a call at eight o'clock, but I'd forgotten to give the person I was having a call with the conference number, so that meant another ten minutes when I could have been in bed, asleep. Curse my disorganisation.

I spent the rest of the day either doing productive things with large amounts of data, or idly pushing my mouse across the top of my desk as I waited for my computer to finish loading something. I think this means that the coffee at the office isn't strong enough. I'd go over the road to Starbucks and buy some stronger stuff, but since it's the end of the month I'm boracic, and in any case there's no point going to Starbucks to improve your productivity.

There's nothing wrong with Starbucks coffee. If you can get some.

Unfortunately, the staff at the Starbucks on New Bridge Road seem to be in dire need of caffeination themselves. They move around behind the counter as slowly as it's possible for a human being to do so, occasionally appearing to respond to communications from customers, but never actually achieving very much. It's taken me ten minutes to get an order taken, and that's not ten minutes waiting in a line, that's ten minutes standing right in front of the cash register with nobody else around, wondering if I've made some terrible mistake in my life choices.

And then I get back to the office and discover that they've given me a blueberry muffin when I asked for a raspberry one.

To any rational person, getting the wrong flavour of muffin is hardly a disaster. There are so many worse things that could happen to you in life. I could be picking through rubbish on the top of the world's biggest trash heap, looking for copper wire to resell. I could own a bar that Jon Taffer is about to arrive and shout at. There could be a shark nibbling at my leg.

But these things aren't happening, and because pain is very much relative to your own experience, I do have to put up with getting the wrong kind of muffin from Starbucks. The blueberry muffin, with the (arguably over) roasted coffee supposedly the mainstay of the Starbucks experience, is revolting. It's been revolting in every Starbucks in every country I've ever been to. And yes, in every country I've been to, I've been to a Starbucks.¹ The blueberry muffin at Starbucks should be delicious, moist, crammed with blueberries. It's half stale, tasteless, has about three imitations of blueberries in it, and is dry enough you could use it as a dessicant when storing clothes. It's just disgusting.

The raspberry muffin, on the other hand, is ... well, actually, it's just like the blueberry muffin, but it does have more sugar on top and a dollop of jam-substitute injected into it.

I really wish I'd spent this evening writing jokes about the Singaporean prison system, but instead, I've been asleep, because I couldn't face going over the road to Starbucks to try any more of their coffee / muffin / long wait. I miss Hong Kong. At least when you order a disgusting mushroom and cheese pocket, you get it almost immediately.

Although I suppose the inherent flaw in ordering a mushroom and cheese pocket is that they give you a mushroom and cheese pocket.

¹ Well, maybe not Cambodia, but I went to a Dairy Queen there, and the first rule of Dairy Queen is ... to not go to Dairy Queen.