Michelle Kaplan

Coffee Quiz:

Using “Secret Starbucks Speak”
Please Identify a LARGE Coffee:
a) Tall
b) Grande
c) Venti
As long as I can remember, I’ve started the day with my required
beverage. Like many of you, I cannot function without my morning
coffee buzz.
I come from a family of obscene coffee drinkers.
My grandmother, Etta, always had a pot of coffee on. She turned me on early — my first fix
at age eight.
My mother, Beverly (AKA the Bevinator), used to scream at her mother-in-law, “Don’t give
her coffee! You’ll stunt her growth!”
I stand five foot ten.

Coffee used to be so simple. Now it’s gotten so freakin’ complicated. They know they’ve got
us just where they want us — it’s called addiction.
No, I CAN’T live without it. People who don’t drink coffee — and I can’t believe there are
people who don’t drink coffee — just don’t get it.
I have a seven dollar and forty-six-cent-a-day habit at Starbucks. Yes, my name is Michelle
and I’m a coffeeaholic.
I order a venti iced latte (why oh why can’t they just call it what it is: small, medium, large
and trough?) and a venti latte at the same time…one hot, one cold — that’s me.
I imagine that there could be an entire personality chart based upon what you order, coffeewise.
It’s kinda like astrology, see, I’m a Gemini, the twins — could this be why I order coffee
two at a time? Hmmmmm….spooky.
Ok, so first there’s the whole coffee experience. I’ll walk you through it. I don’t actually go
into the shop often; I’m usually there, with vehicle, at the drive-thru. In fact, dinner for me is
usually just this:
(fade to Starbucks Drive-Thru)
Ahhh, the ambiance of the dining experience via the drive-thru at Starbucks… Starting with
the server always ‘uber hip’ who repeats your order like a parrot and always, ALWAYS, corrects
it…trust me, you can never say it in “Secret Starbucks Speak.”
“Welcome to Starbucks,” says the uber hip, “Can I take your order?”
“Hi, yeah, thanks, I’ll have a venti iced latte with four equals and a venti latte the same way.”
“Iced Caffe` Venti Four Equal Latte?” corrects the uber hip Starbucks persona non grata in
“Secret Starbucks Speak.”
“You got it,” I say. You’ve got to be nice to the uber hip, otherwise they’ll withhold the coffee
even longer.
Which brings us to:
What is the deal with the wait? When they finally ask me to drive up
to collect my elixir of the gods in a cup, I often ask the uber hip coffee distributor, “What the
heck takes so long? Did you actually go to Bogota to get the coffee?”
They usually return that with the rolling eyes and exasperated expression to which I KNOW
they are trained.
Coffee is a luxury item for me, much like gasoline. In fact, if I could do the math, (which I
can’t), I believe that I could figure out which is more expensive these days…coffee or gas?
Gas or coffee? Hmmm…I think if they’re going to charge us so much for coffee I want to see
freakin’ Juan Valdez at the window, serving me the coffee in person.
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QUIZ ANSWER: C