Am I Alone in Fearing the Sabotage of the Homeless?

Jim Roundman, Business Analyst

Jim Roundman is a noted business professional with a wide variety of strategic backgrounds. He will contribute regularly to The Albatross to bring light to some of the most burning issues affecting the sophisticated mercantile community.

Am I the only one who always hesitates, at least somewhat, when the time comes in the coffee store to pour milk from the milk carton into the coffee? I mean, it’s not that I’m so paranoid that I’m ultimately unable to go through with it, or that I think the coffee store ought to be posting a 24-hour security detail on the milk island thing, but I just can’t help but think of all the ways that you could fuck with the milk.

I mean, if you were a bum, and you hated life – and you probably would – wouldn’t you be in the coffee store one day, begging for coffee, and then after you get the coffee you’d just be like, “Myaaahhh, I’m gonna piss all over this milk!”

It has to be the case.

Don’t try to tell me that bums aren’t in coffee stores. Bums drink coffee – shit, bums eat coffee. I saw a bum eat coffee. They need that shit so they don’t get jacked by other bums who have the guile to get the drop on their co-bums by adjusting their sleep schedules somewhat. This is the nature and affectation of the bum marketplace.

Anyways, at the very least, a bum could spit in the milk. Anybody could spit in the milk! It’s an open container of milk, sitting right there, relatively unsurveilled, and everytime you use it, you participate in an act of ultimate communal trust: You share that milk with everyone.

Do you trust everyone? You do if you use that milk.

And maybe that’s what gives me pause.

Still, what can you do? Some coffee shops offer packaged creamers, but that isn’t appropriate. Packaged creamers were created to be put in sit-down restaurants, they’re for coffee in nice cups, when you go out with friends and family. Who goes to coffee shops with friends and family? Nobody. You go to coffee shops with friends and family when you feel obligated to tell them to fuck off, and that you never want to see them again.

Coffee shops are for destroying relationships, or for meeting people to buy drugs off of, or to meet other chain smokers for casual sex, or for reading shitty community newspapers, or used car salesbooks, or for having donuts before shooting yourself. What’s so great about that?

So, you see, it’s not consistent. Coffee stores really do need fresh milk, but how do you ensure its freshness? There are bums stalking the milk.

I wish someone would tell these bums: It’s not my fault.

Don’t listen to those undergrads protesting your lack of free money, all trying to get on your good side when they say I was talking shit about you on the internet. All of that is just happening now, so why would there be piss, spit, and God knows what else probably in the milk I poured in my coffee this morning? You’re not time travelers.

Don’t get crafty on me, you fucking plague draggers.

Watch yourself.

Am I out of line on this? Is there nobody else who is not at least a little suspicious of the milk? People don’t even close the tops of the cartons. Anything could happen! A bird could fly into the store and shit in it. You’d never know. One of the bum warlords could conceive of a plan to actually replace one of the milk containers with a milk container that he and all of his people put together. I don’t know what’s in there.

Look – none of this has ever happened. What I really rely on is not knowing. What I really rely on is the total homogeneity of whatever these bums are doing to the coffee store milk. So long as it remains absolutely smooth, I will concede that I’ll never know that what I didn’t know couldn’t be something that I knew would hurt me.

But, if I ever detect the slightest change in consistency of the pouring of that milk – if I ever hear the tiniest plop, or feel the slightest agitation in my pouring hand of anything more than complete, 100% liquid, so help me God: I will fling that fucking coffee across the entire goddamn store, and I will scream, ‘Fucking bums!’ and I will demand a refund, and I will go out onto the street and issue challenges. You think I’m scared of you? You wish I was scared of you.

I started out in real estate, and I made myself the man I am today.

And please don’t start in on how bums wouldn’t do all that – what else are they going to do? They sit out there and they dream up ways to fuck with people, because they’re broke, and they’re drug addicts, and they’re fucking bums. What bums have ever un-bummed? They love it.

They love pissing in my milk.

And the staff act like they don’t know, they’re all like, “Oh, gee wilson, I was just pouring a fudge latte.”

If you watch closely, though, the staff never drink the coffee, or at least not with milk in it. Communists also always drink their coffee black.

Goddamn fucking undergraduates.

Fucking bums.