Okay, so tell me I’m not the only one who does this, because if I am I might get a little creeped out with myself.

I had another of those long nasty marathon sessions at work the other day, overhauling—for the third time in a month or so—the goddamn mail server. Turns out the one we Frankenberried together was not doing well, producing random bluescreens that I was unable to pin down. I did everything I could to ameliorate the situation: swapped out the hard drive, replaced the RAM, installed a new power supply….nothing seemed to help. At some point you have to just throw in the towel and pronounce your efforts to have been for naught. Certain ASUS motherboards are known to have a reputation for capacitor failures, which may have been the case here, but even if I knew that this was the case it would leave me in much the same position. So we took the opportunity to retire one of our largely redundant servers and move its functions over to another machine, saving energy and waste heat in the process. 

Of course, the process of migrating our mail server to another PC, along with about 40 gigabytes of corporate mail, took us until around ten that night, so it was past my bedtime as I rolled outa Dodge, not to mention that we’d been at it for about ten hours so I was fairly bushed. I needed a pick-me-up before I drove back up to Seattle. Problem is, no coffee shops in the Olympia area are open at ten-thirty on a weeknight. So I was reduced to stopping at a 7-11 for a mammoth mug of their famous coffee-scented Toner Ade, beefed up with a half-dozen squirts of high-fructose corn syrup suspended in a matrix of partially hydrogenated soybean oil. If the sugar and caffeine don’t keep you awake, the acid indigestion sure will. I paid for my proto-joe and was on my way home.

As I rounded the on-ramp and merged onto the deserted lanes of Interstate 5, I brought my coffee to my lips. The lids for most hot beverage containers provided by commercial establishments tend to be constructed along similar architectural lines, the state of the art having been agreed upon some time ago: a foreshortened plastic dome, flattened across the top, with a single narrow hole through which one may pull draughts of coffee/chai/whathaveyou. This design maximizes the ability to access reasonable (i.e., enough to satisfy but not enough to vulcanize) amounts of beverage while minimizing the amount that can be spilled in the event of drops, bumps, fuel-truck rollovers with attendant dodging of flaming wreckage, etc. It has thankfully all but replaced that other, far less effective and structurally sound coffee cover: the flat lid of almost monomolecular thickness with the big perforated truncated-pie-wedge-shaped chunk removed, through which mouth-scaldingly large volumes of molten liquid can sluice with happy abandon at the slightest provocation.

The only real problem with the modern to-go coffee lid is that it can be difficult to find that hole on first application, particularly while driving. Such was my situation as I tried to get some of my café laughable down my gullet and slathered all over my by-then highly attenuated nervous system. Even if I had been willing to take my eyes off the road, the inside of the car was dark and it’s highly unlikely that I would have been able to identify the tiny hole anyway, even as I careened off the road and flipped over the concrete barrier. I suppose I could have used a finger, but frankly, my hands had been in and out of manky computers all night, and I didn’t trust them to not leave their mark.

So instead I used the most convenient, motile and sensitive agent I had at my disposal at the time: my tongue. I ran the tip  around the edge of the lid until I found the hole. Then, with the tip still lightly inserted, I rotated the cup until I had it more or less sighted down the center of my mouth, dislodged it and proceeded to imbibe.

It was on perhaps the second or third enacting of this highly effective solution that it struck me to wonder if I was the only person who negotiates his travel beverage by essentially rimming it, or if anyone else has chosen this solution to the problem as well. So if you have, let me know. Please.  😯