The Daily Gripe #22 - Stir Sticks

It's time for The Daily Gripe, from Average Joe American.

Yesterday my wife and I drove to Indianapolis. On the way, I had the urge for a tall, hot coffee, so we stopped at a Thornton's gas station.

Now this may seem petty, but I class this with a group of irritants that I like to call the "Somebody Wasn't Thinking" gripes. Okay, I just made that up, but you'll see what I mean soon enough.

I don't drink my coffee black. I like to add a little sugar so it tastes just a little better than used dish water. I grabbed a thirty-two ounce disposable coffee cup and, like most people would do, I filled it up with coffee. Then I tore open a couple of sugar packets and poured them in. I'm a sugar man -- no artificial sweetener for me. That just makes coffee taste like last night's used dish water.

As I dumped my trash in the receptacle, I looked for a stirrer to mix my sugar into the coffee. They never seem to make these things easy to find. In this case, they happened to be disguised as miniature straws, each individually wrapped. I tore free the paper wrapping, plunged the stirrer into my hot coffee, began stirring, and burned my fingers! This thing was at least two inches too short to reach the bottom of the cup, which was where all of the sugar had settled to by the time I found the stealth stirrers. That really gripes me!

Do they think only people who like their coffee black buy the large cups? They certainly can't expect you to stir while you add creme and/or sugar with as well as they have hidden the stirrers. You'd think with the huge profits the oil companies have been leaching from us since 9/11 that they could afford to buy stirrers just two inches longer. Or real spoons, for that matter.

Instead, I poured some of the coffee from my cup, stirred again, then nursed my poor fingers back to health as we made our way down the highway.

Joe