Our strange coffee habit

Is it a habit, an addiction, or a social condition? – which ever, it’s firmly ensconced
in our daily lives. It’s not life sustaining, but it does seem to be the essential ingredient needed to kick start our day. We’re talking coffee in a paper cup. Full grown men, resplendent in business suits, suck on the nozzle of the plastic lid. A hang-over from their infant dummy days perhaps, or a more recently discarded cigarette addiction. It’s not gender specific though; the females of the species are equally ‘sucked in’. If you’ve ridden a peak hour escalator you’ll relate to this comic situation. There you are standing directly behind a suit clad, brief case carrying, umbrella wielding, coffee cup balancing, person. It becomes a matter of personal judgement as to which you should dodge to avoid a crack in the ribs, a poke in the eye, or a cup of coffee right down your front.
I’ve watched bus, train and ferry passengers on a short commute, sitting or strap hanging, clutching their precious cup of coffee. There are those who put it on the floor for safe keeping then promptly kick it over, leaving a trail of lukewarm liquid to make its way under the seats. There it stays for the rest of the day unless some unsuspecting passenger accidentally uses their sports bag or brief case to mop it up.
If the carrier and the cup do eventually make it to the office the cup often gets knocked over in the morning flurry. The result – a soggy keyboard, or worse case scenario, a drowned laptop.
During office hours these same coffee addicts punctuate their day and hence the time that they spend at their desk, with frequent trips out to pick up another ‘fix’.
City bins overflow with discarded cups; that’s if the drinkers subscribe to the “keep Australia clean” message. If not, you’ll spy these wayward cups dumped on ledges, in gutters, or heaven forbid, on vacant tables of outdoor cafés.
Office workers haven’t got exclusive rights to this compulsion to suck. Bus drivers to have cottoned on. Here’s a real life experience to prove it. It’s the end of his shift, time for a change of driver. The passengers sit patiently waiting while the driver checks the destination board and ticket machine then …horrors, he looks for a place on the dashboard to rest his coffee cup. The passengers pray silently that the driver will have to stop at every red light (not a prayer that they’d normally want delivered) to give him time to finish his coffee before hitting the peak hour traffic in the CBD.
But wait, he had competition on his inside lane. A sweet young thing, driving a mini minor doing a juggling act with, you’ve guessed it – a cup of coffee, a mobile phone, and the steering wheel.
Time for a strong black coffee……………..