Weekday mornings my coffee choices are more or less limited to a single bagel shop. They've cornered the market on my weekday coffee consumption by virtue of their ability to keep coffee inside the cup. Too many vendors fail this seemingly rudimentary task. Coffee spills from their cups at the slightest jar of uneven pavement. Given that I live in a state whose roads are consistently voted among the worst in the nation, inferior cups took liberties to paint my car's interior with irregularly shaped brown blotches.
The problem is readily identifiable. They've got a hole in the fscking lid.
Soon after the container was invented, people raised the bar by using containers to carry liquids. They noticed that liquids, fluid by nature, spilled over the sides when they carried them to work. In response, the lid was invented. For years after that development, life was grand and humans carried liquids to work with them.
A contingency of people enjoyed this innovation so much that they decided to drink from the container through a hole in the lid. As the liquid cooled, they tore a hole and sipped carefully. This offered the benefit of utilizing most of the lid's fluid blocking characteristics while allowing some of the liquid out in a controlled manner. A mindful maker of lids noticed this trend and added a perforated outline of a hole. Now life was very grand and humans continued to carry liquids to work with them.
But then some asshole decided to circumvent that all important Let-The-Coffee-Cool-First step and he put a fscking hole in the lid from the start. Starbucks popularized this particular model as it emerged an international provider of ghey coffee. Atop its bleach-free, environmentally friendly, post-consumer waste paper cups it placed a non-biodegradable plastic lid with a hole where more plastic should have been.
Soon environmentally friendly paper cups with a hole in a plastic lid became the rage of all manufacturers of "upscale" coffee. In order to hike the price, a hole became a necessary accessory for a product which sells with a warning that the contents are hot enough to do damage to your body.
So now I go to the bagel shop down the street where they have coffee cups with holes in the lids despite the fact that they charge a mere dollar for a large. But they also have styrofoam cups manufactured by Dart Container Corp. The styrofoam is intended for softdrinks which are sweetened with fructose but are really quite disgusting. The owner of the bagel shop allows me to use them for my morning joe. He does this probably because he's a nice guy but possibly because I'm a pain in the ass. Either way, there has been a marked reduction in the number of stains inside my car....
