Mornings are not the brightest moments of our lives. We are groggy and not the nicest people to know before noon. Ask anyone who rings our doorbell in the morning – the car cleaner, the clothes ironing guy – and you will hear horror stories.
Think of Hugh Grant and his sister waking up and running late (the clip’s dubbed in French but you will get the idea) at Four Weddings and a Funeral. That’s us. Panting, rushing, cursing the cell phone alarm. Desperate search for matching socks (me). Bumping into each other as we rush to get ready. Hurried SMSs to folks at work. Bundling into the car, traffic, snooze. Breakfasts missed. Coffee desperately sought.
Kainaz’s office is at Peninsula Park. I usually drop her on the way to work. The Cafe Coffee Day (CCD) there is our lifeline. K gets her morning fix of cappuccino to steel herself for the day. She often makes many more trips down during the day to CCD with her friends at work.
The stretch between our offices is fraught with mind numbing traffic. And I work at a locality which is light years away from a decent cup of coffee. So I normally pick a coffee along with K before I set off for the final frontier.
The staff at CCD, Pen Park, know K and her coffee companions, including me, by now. They even know each person’s idiosyncracies and personal tastes. In fact K referred to the folks at CCD as ‘family’ as we set off from home this morning.
Mona and Eliza from CCD are normally there when we reach in the morning. One look at us and they start preparing K’s ‘cappuccino in a takeaway cup, extra hot, with a lid and a straw ‘ and my ‘cappuccino in a takeaway cup, with half a sachet of brown sugar, and foil around the lid (to prevent spills in the car)’. Words are redundant.
I then take my cup, bid adieu and head off to work.
Today was the same. I took my coffee, stepped out of CCD, began skipping down the passage (morning does weird things to me).
The cup slipped out of my hand and fell!
A bit of coffee spilled onto the floor and the sipper came out of the cup. The rest was intact thanks to the foil.
I sheepishly went back to CCD to pick up another straw. Most of the coffee was still in the cup and could be salvaged.
Eliza saw me, frowned, and asked if I had dropped my coffee. I affirmed. She got all worked up said that she would replace my coffee. I was touched but said that it wasn’t required as most of the coffee was there. She would have none of it and took the coffee cup from me. Eliza and Mona rushed to prepare a fresh cup of steaming coffee for me, packed it up and sent me off to work.
K and I walked out. On the way I saw a janitor trying to figure out who spilt the coffee in the passage. I tried to keep a straight face and walked off in a dignified manner. Not very convincingly according to K.
The cappuccino, served with ‘the milk of human kindness’, did make me unusually chirpy this morning.
Thanks Eliza and Mona.
