I got plastic-straw shamed at the campus Starbucks a couple weeks ago, and I haven't felt quite that stupid in recent memory. The scene:
I was late to a group outing with one of my teams because of a meeting I had to facilitate with another of my teams. It was hot, I was stressing, totally frazzled, and starting to get a pre-migraine aura going. Usually a healthy dose of caffeine will nip a headache before it goes full-blown migraine for me, so I braved the student union at peak coffee time. Having ordered my iced coffee with a shot of espresso, the oh-so-college, oh-so-Stanford barista turns back to me and asks, "And have you brought your own straw today?"
Taken aback a bit (San Francisco just banned plastic straws at the beginning of the month, and the law doesn't go into effect until 2020), I shook my head and, dumbly, muttered, "Uh...no." The barista raised one eyebrow, with that perfect, intense condescension only a supercilious college student can master, and asked, "Well, would you like to buy a reusable steel straw for $2.99?"
I was grumpy, campers. I was hot, I was anxious about how my day was shaping up, and frankly, I didn't want to carry a dripping, sticky straw with me to the food bank we were volunteering at later. So I said no, probably a little more tersely than I should have. And the barista raised the other eyebrow, overtly judging me and my hatred of the sea turtles and my lack of consideration for future generations, and turned away to make my drink...but not before muttering "wowwwww" in that perfectly under-her-breath-but-clearly-meant-to-be-heard way. And I started laughing, because how do you not laugh at something that ridiculous?
So fast forward to this morning, where I was in desperate need of a caffeine hit en route to my off-campus office and zipped to the "nice" Starbucks with the drive-thru. Yes, I felt like a total bum getting drive-thru coffee - but some mornings, one needs to minimize human interactions before 9am, and today is one of those days. And my drink came with this weird sippy cup lid:
I might be the last person to find out that Starbucks is going fully strawless by 2020, and replacing the straws with these recyclable plastic lids. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for earth-saving and reduction of plastic waste and all that jazz. Today, though, as I went to take the first sip of my nitro cold brew (#millennial), it sloshed out the too-large hole on top, down the front of my white dress (because OF COURSE I was wearing a white dress). And now I'm sitting here in my office, having made my angel of an admin give me all her Tide pens, and my entire chest is wet from the emergency stain removal work I undertook...so I look like a lactating mother having serious issues, basically.
In other words, the most Monday-ish of Mondays, and we're only a few hours in. Here's hoping there's nowhere to go from here but up...