Coffee Weapon

Oh-My… Starbucks shareholders (fat cats) attending the company’s Annual Meeting on Wednesday in Seattle will get more than management’s side of the story (hookers) this year. They will also get great visuals from the disgruntled baristas (underpaid coffee servers) that work for the company. The baristas are planning a giant inflatable ‘fat cat’ (shareholders) crushing an inflatable Starbucks barista (college kid behind the counter) in full uniform and a gigantic inflatable rat (new flavor). Baristas and coffee farmer advocates (safari Junkets) will send a strong message (loud chanting) to Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz (head fat cat) that the world’s largest coffee chain (Dunkin Donuts?) must move beyond the rhetoric (practice of persuasion, see metaphilosophy) and respect the rights of workers (stop making them wear those ridiculous uniforms) across the Starbucks supply chain.

It seems that Starbucks baristas are facing a relentless anti-union campaign and coffee farmers are living in grinding (surprise) poverty. The Starbucks Workers Union (StarbucksUnion.org) is an organization of employees at the coffee giant united for a living wage, secure hours, and dignity (free scones) on the job.

Seem to be a worthy (free beer and hotdogs) and noble (unpaid day off from serving coffee) cause and I wish them luck.

Kevin

So I should mention something about my free cup of Starbucks coffee on Thursday.. I have really only been in Starbucks a few times. The coffee I had from there always has a burnt taste to me but it’s free today so what the heck. We usually go to Starbucks when the wife wants a book since the Starbucks around here is in a big bookstore.

This place Starbucks can really be intimidating to someone like me, a regular coffee drinker. Oh well the coffee is free today and I’m already stoked up from the pot of Folgers from this morning. I get in line, check my watch,  yep still time for some free coffee. As long as this line keeps moving and I can place my order before noon.

Looks like they are not so happy to be giving away the coffee this morning. Suppose a lot of us here aren’t part of their regular Starbucks crowd.  As I get closer to ordering I have a gaze at the board above those busy, annoyed looking baristas. Yikes, I don’t see anything that I recognize, nothing resembling cup-of-regular-coffee. What the heck is a Venti and why would i want the special.. It’s a low-cal frappe-mocha with a triple shot of caffeine boosting apricot oil. Yuck, do people actually buy those. It’s on sale today. only $4.90.. what?? I’m sorry but I would never pay that for a cup of Joe. Anyways I spot tall coffee on the board, oh yes, that’s for me, I like my coffee tall and long lasting so it lasts along time. yes!

Somehow I feel out of place standing in line but finally I am the next to order, just in time as they are just a couple of minutes left in the free coffee give away. The nicely dressed woman in front of me places her order. She orders a Ethiopian cha-cha mango fruity Raspberry frappe-latte with cinnamon-hazelnut dust, steamed French laced soy milk. “Make it a Grande” she says. I’m thinking, Why not pour it directly in the toilet and  just watch it. Wow, I guess there is such a thing as crapp-achino.

Finally, it’s my turn to order, To make it look like I know what I’m doing in this snazzy coffee house, with confidence, I tell the barista, ahem “Hello I would like a fresh regular extra-Columbian roasted full flavored java, add no sugar with whole milk and make it a large.. um.. tall.. yes make it tall!” I’m so proud of my order but the female barista just stared at me dumbfounded. “I’m sorry sir but we would have to brew you a pot of regular coffee and if you are in line for our free coffee offer that just ended five minutes ago. Groans from behind me , I just tell her, relieved, “never mind I think I’ll just go read a magazine instead.”

Kevin

So I’m sitting here without my free cup of lousy Starbucks coffee checking out some email, It’s all kind of boring so I decide to visit a site that I haven’t been to in awhile. The official forum boards for The Sims Online. I used to play this game a couple of years back. It’s an MMORPG. It wasn’t considered to be a very good game. Even though The Sims was hugely popular, the online version lacked a lot of the things people liked about the offline version, like user created custom content and terrain building tools. There just wasn’t enough to do for most gamers and most people that tried it and left after a month because well you ran out of fun pretty quickly and most of the game revolved around repetitive game play. As an example you would do what they call skill to get interactions which involved sitting at your computer watching your sim read a book or play chess or some other dull thing. What fun is that? I wasn’t into the cybersex or the scamming that go’s on in these kinds of games. I have to admit that I played it for about 4 months as a beta tester and another 18 month after it went live before my group of friends decided to move on to better games.

Anyways I hadn’t been to these forums for months. After I quit playing the game I still would frequently check the forums to see if they had added anything that would make me want to come back to try and I have to admit it was kind of like gawking at a car accident. Month’s went by and I know that I had left at a good time. Electronics Arts had basically abandoned the game, no new content, no news about anything the developers were planning on implementing to make the game fresh.

So the page loads up and I see the usual posts about fixing the economy of the game and all the other boring posts people make about the game when I notice a post by a VIP named Luc. Could it be the Luc Barthelet that was involved with the development of the game. I had the honor of meeting him and several others including Will Wright during the beta phase of development.

His post::

I started a blog a www.TSO-E.com do discuss some ideas about what we could change in The Sims Online. I welcome feedback on those ideas on the Blog. Thanks
Luc

Wow.. he typos like I do! Could it be that EA has come to there senses and decided to make A Sims Online that lives up the the Sims franchise? My first thought was why? Why would they want to redo an old game with outdated graphics and stale game play? Could they really add custom content and make the game play so that real gamers would want to play The Sims Online? Or is this some cruel joke EA is playing on the few remaining fan boys left playing? I will defiantly be keeping an eye on his blog to see if this can be done. Kevin