not david.

To tell this story would force me to admit that I drank a cup of coffee, after I'd gone to the trouble of documenting that I quit drinking coffee. And of course all my problems with coffee were really just problems with caffeine, a habit I think that I could really quit if not for the presence of it in tea. To give up tea would be to deny my redneck past, and while I'm ready to do that in a lot of ways, none of them are gastronomical.

One morning this week, I was Dragging. I hadn't gotten much high-quality sleep the night before and I stared at my monitor as if it were displaying a foreign language. I mean, I was looking at some really convoluted code at the time, but it was still me a long time to register that I was looking at the wrong thing. So I went to the breakroom and got a cup of coffee. Then I came to the problem of creamer.

Here I'll take a brief paragraph to explain that I am a firm supporter of cows. In that I mean that I hate fake dairy products. I think you could cure my caffeine habit completely if you told me I had to put non-dairy creamer in every caffeinated beverage I drank (which would make Mountain Dew really nasty). I don't even really trust soy milk, because I'm just not sure how one would go about milking a bean.

So I've got my cup of coffee and I'm looking at the non-dairy creamer provided for public use. It's even the fancy brand and it just looks gross. "You are not creamer! I don't believe in you! I don't believe in you!" I want to yell at it as if it's my own personal dairy Jabberwocky. I take a look in the fridge and see about three containers of real, wonderful, needs-to-be-refrigerated half and half. They look cool and refreshing. I pick up each one and give it a little shake to see how much is in each - very little. One of them is labelled "David." Crap. Never in my life have I been so sorry that my name is Not David. I look around furtively as if I'm about to tell an off-color joke and pour a little creamer in my coffee from each container. I have become a creamer thief, and it tastes so good.

Fast-forward a few days, when I'm in the break room again and a fellow is getting his own cup of joe. He reaches into the fridge and pulls out one of the half and half containers while I watch out my peripheral vision. His name is Not David. Creamer Thief! Creamer Thief! I casually question him.

"Oh, is that communal creamer?"
"Yeah."
"Doesn't it say 'David?'"
"Well, yeah. One time David brought in some half and half. And we all asked if we could use it and he said we could, but then we used it all. So we felt bad and bought him a new one and labelled it 'David.' We've been doing that ever since."

Wonderful, beautiful real dairy creamer for all the Not Davids. It's too bad I gave up coffee.