Overcaffeinated again

I drank a coffee this morning that was so strong it gave me double vision. Bugeyed and overstimulated on sugar and caffeine, I stumbled away from Fuel. Nearby a woman was yelling into her phone nearby, telling somebody not to accuse her, but just say what she wanted to. That confused me. It sounded like the person on the other end just wanted to accuse her of something. Maybe I should have shared some of my coffee.

Pardon My French

One of my favourite places to get coffee in Hong Kong is Fuel. It's a New Zealand coffee bar with a couple of branches; one in the upper reaches of the IFC mall, and the other submerged in the basement of the Landmark mall. At both, the coffee is good. The staff are generally both friendly and attentive (although there was one time it took them 5 goes to make me an espresso, which suggests a strange combination of diligence and incompetence). Finally, they serve an artery-hardening selection of baked goods, including a chocolate coated, sugar-slathered slice of caramel that, like a Proustian madeline, makes me think of happiness in Hong Kong and rage with a database simultaneously.

Cold French Press

Today we went to TOTT, a large kitchen supply shop in Singapore, adjacent to a BMW dealership. Perfect for anyone who likes sharp knives and rear-wheel-drive cars.

Since that demographic would appear to be comprised mainly of hoodlums, I was surprised by the paucity of gangsters in the shop. That did make it easier for us to browse for new cutlery and bowls (now it's been ten years since I bought my cutlery it needed some refreshing), and while we were there I picked up a small French press.

End of the month

Today I got paid, which was nice, because I only had $20 left in my bank account. I suppose that is a success, to have burned through almost exactly (but no more) than the cash I had a month ago. I contemplated celebrating by going to my favourite bar and drinking half the month's salary, but my wife had other ideas this evening.

For Coffee

I've survived an entire week at work without coffee. While I wasn't as mellow by the middle of the week as I'd been on the Monday, I was still fairly calm and collected on Friday afternoon. I'm not sure if this will survive contact with the enemy / the aftermath of a flight across the Pacific to Seattle, but it's worth trying.

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.

Espresso Beer

Espresso beer is one of those wonderful contradictions, like, er, methampetamine-laced cannabis. Hang on, that's not very family friendly. It's like cauliflower-flavoured bacon. It's like cruelty-free foie gras, it's like a low-calorie cattleprod, it's like a canine-friendly Mitt Romney. (That will be so dated if read in 5 years' time.)

Abstinence

Today I decided to stop drinking coffee, to see what will happen. This is a fairly stupid thing to do, because I know what will happen; I'll spend two weeks readjusting (falling asleep at my desk, accidentally putting my hand in the toaster, treading on fragile valuables) and after that, I'll be able to function normally. As in the way I was when I was drinking coffee.

Saving money: #1 Drinking Lattes

One common piece of personal financial advice is to stop drinking lattes. If every day you're paying $4 for a latte, over the course of a year you've forked out more than $1,400. Does that make you wake up a bit?

The American

This afternoon I tried to watch a French film that had been subtitled into English in Hong Kong. You could detect this by every other sentence ending with the mysterious word 'ah'. No, really ah.

Since it also had a Russian soundtrack, it was basically unwatchable as the director had intended (though it looked beautiful ah) so I watched The American instead. Ah.

My dogged determination

Today I had a presentation to make to about fifty people across the region. Unfortunately in typical dog-ate-my-homework style, all the data I was depending on was incomplete, wrong, or just plain unavailable. And what I did have left to show people seemed to have become invisible, so my nicely formatted ten slide Powerpoint presentation ended up as a sloppily formatted five slide presentation, which made me look like a halfwit. I did notice afterwards that the person controlling the slideshow had managed to skip past at least one slide without me noticing, which only added to the idiocy I felt.

However, I did salvage some pride by putting this picture of a Spitz at the end of my presentation, at which point people seemed to overlook the preceding pages of bilge, and start asking me why I'd chosen a dog rather than a cat.

Do you really know my name? My relationship with Starbucks

Because I have some fairly clear personality defects, I have a spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet logs how much money I've given to Starbucks since October of last year. Every latte, every mushroom pocket, every blueberry muffin, recorded there.

Well, not every muffin. That would be ludicrous; anal retentive I might be, but I've only got as far as recording how much I've spent. Life's too short to record everything in a spreadsheet.

A lot of people don't know that...

... that when you go into a Starbucks and order a "venti", you're not asking for something that's extra large. You're asking for a 20 [ounce container of steamed milk] which is (to a pedant) as amusing as asking for a "latte" [milk] when you wanted coffee with steamed milk. And the kind of person who points this out is the kind of person with no life who'd chortle to himself about how clever he was as he gives you 20 ounces of steamed milk rather than the coffee you both knew you wanted. And clearly he can't have been that clever, because how many Italians use Imperial measurements? And come to think of it, wouldn't an American ounce probably be a bit smaller than an English ounce, and since we were the ones with the Empire first, thankyouverymuch surely you've got Colonial measurements and not Imperial?

But enough of this smug pedantry. It's not good for the onlooker or the involved. It's of use to understand the etymology of "venti" means they're supplying you with a 20-ounce container (or 24-ounce for cold drinks, apparently), because then you don't just stand there saying "oh, cor blimey, how pretentious of them to make up the names of the cups with no relation to reality." Yes, it is pretentious for an American company to name cup sizes after Italian numbers (and inconsistent because they don't do it for any of the rest), but that still means it bears more relation to reality than you gave it credit for.

And while we're at it, shouldn't you be drinking a short cup anyway, not a tall? Tall is not a small cup of coffee unless you're some sort of fat beast.

At least, I've gleaned this rage through paying attention while reading books on Starbucks (the tall/short/small/slightly larger sleight-of-hand is a wonder of modern revenue management) but I've also been looking on My Starbucks Idea, which collects all the idiocy anyone could ever bear to read about Starbucks, and people who really really want to pay to wear a shirt to advertise Starbucks to other people, and an awful lot of people who can't spell venti correctly. Oh, and Bruce, who if he'd read what I've just been through, maybe wouldn't be moaning quite so plaintively. What is "normal" anyway?

I'll stop now before I get angry.