A Tale of a Tuesday Morning

YES...I know it's Thursday now. And this will have to actually be short because somehow in the process of playing the guitar I sprained my left pinky finger, and it hurts exceedingly terrible. Okay, that was a bad attempt at being descriptive. Nonetheless, if any q's, a's, or z's are missing from my narrative, you know why.

So Tuesday morning, I was rendered Groggy Beyond Repair. After I had driven out of the driveway only to be almost run over by a car speeding up the hill and around the curve (we don't really have an ideal location for our driveway), I made up my mind that in order to prevent any more accidents, I must get some coffee. Sure, I had already had one cup, but that was 3 1/2 hours before I had gotten in the car! So I was off to Starbucks.

I walked in quickly, wanting to get out of the humidity as soon as possible. You must understand, humidity does abhorable things to my hair. I will not go into detail...you'll see for yourself sooner or later. So I shuffled over to the cash register, and a blonde woman with freckles and plastic-rimmed glasses said to me "Hiiii-ya, what can I get you this morning?!?!?!" in a very valley-girl sort of accent, in a very hyper fashion. It seemed innocent enough...typical Starbuckian behavior.

I said, "I'll take a grande caramel latte with whip and drizzle."
Before I could get past the grande caramel latte part, however, she said, "Grande caramel latteeeeeee, good choice!!!"

So I tried to repeat myself, "With whip and drizzle, please..."

Before I could get past saying "whip" again, she exclaimed, "With whip, oh, awesome!! Would you like drizzle on that too at no extra charge?"

"Yes," I muttered, attempting to act pleasant.

"Alright, that will be *insert actual price that I cannot remember here*."

So, I had two giftcards that looked exactly the same. I thought that I had marked one with a "B" because it was from Barb, and left the one from Elayna without any markings on it, so I could remember which one had more money on it. Alas, all I could find was one blank and one with a number "2" on the front. Being really really really sleepy as stated before, I concluded that the one from Barb was the one with nothing written on it, even though I had gotten the one from her second, so naturally I would have written number "2" on it.

I gave the lady the blank card, and she scanned it, looked at the screen for a second, and then started rambling on about something. I'm sure I looked at her quite confusedly, and perhaps I was the one in the wrong because I was not fully awake. But she kept saying, "You owe, like, two dollars and eighty-seven cents on your card."

I blinked cluelessly.

"Do you understand what I'm saying?" She asked, still in valley girl mode.

"Uh...no," I confessed.

"I scanned your card, and now you, like, owe, like, two dollars and eighty-seven cents on it," she repeated, handing the card back to me.

"Oh..." I nodded. And then, being sleepy, as usual, I just handed her the $50 bill I had in my wallet, instead of reaching in for the other Starbucks card. Somehow in that moment I had also acquired the notion that Barb had given me a card with only $1 on it, instead of the actual $15.

Because of the fifty, it took her a long time to make change. In that lengthy moment, I finally put two and two together and realized I had used the wrong card. She gave me my change and said that momentarily my drink would b up.

I threw the old card away and waited what seemed like an eternity for my drink, which the Valley Girl Coffee Lady also made, while talking to all her co-workers about who-knows-what, in that same accent. The only good thing about it was that she wasn't paying her entire attention to what she was doing, and gave me a LOT of whipped cream.

That was my only consolation.

I sped out of the shop with my drink, drove around the shopping center a couple times searching for an exit facing in the direction I wanted to go, and finally sped on out of there to school. To calm my rage (rather, a constant rolling of my eyes--so I'm not sure how I got there in one piece), I was able to find a parking spot fairly quickly that WASN'T in Alaska.

This morning I went to the same shopping center, but instead of the main Starbucks, I went to the one inside Harris Teeter. What wonderful reasonable people work there!! Well, the barista didn't give me SO much whipped cream...but to actually deal with a sane race made that a minor setback.

And I found an even closer parking space this morning... :D