February 13, 2014 Adam

Starbucks Shenanigans

Blog

I went to Starbucks with Zack today. I thought it would be a uneventful coffee run, but nope. It was very eventful.

We arrived at 2:15ish, about 20 minutes before those gremlin-esk high schoolers could take our table. We sat at my usual 6-seater table and the place wasn’t overly filled. It was great. There were some people talking about business stuff, a few doing homework, an off-duty barista ordering some form of mocha, and two old ladies talking on the couch. It was nice and quiet.

I sat in my usual corner seat at the table, and then Zack decided to sit on the same side on the opposite end. I was a little confused at first, just because it seemed like a strange seating arrangement. But then I did what any mature 23-year-old would do; I threw a mini tantrum and moved his stuff over without telling him while he was ordering his drink.

He came back to the table and gave me a weird look, but that’s nothing new. He gives me weird looks all the time. As he walked up to the counter to get his stuff, I realized 4 things and then decided to follow him: 1). We both had MacBooks open on the table. 2). Mine has an awesome Batman sticker on the lid. 3). There was an attractive lady in line. 4). I should put his stuff back on my side so people can compare my sticker to his lack-of-sticker and judge our Apple products.

I hastily moved his stuff back over, making sure other people could clearly see the lids of our machines, and then I fast walked up to the counter. Me going up to the counter had 2 purposes: 1). To show Zack our computers so we could admire them from afar, and 2). There was a cute 20-something female in line, and I wanted to admire her not from afar and say hi.

I accomplished 1/3 of that. I got Zack’s attention and turned him around to face our table and we stared at our laptops for about 6 seconds, give or take. Then I went to say hi to the cute coffee-goer, and I did what I always do: absolutely nothing. I turned around to possibly attempt saying hi (or maybe I was going to ask her about having a tail, my line of thought never got that far), and then I did absolutely nothing. I’ve always wondered what caused that. It’s like I go to say something, and then something in my head says at the last second, “psych. You don’t want to say anything anymore. Just kidding.” And then I don’t. This time I just admired my Batman sticker from afar some more.

[fast forward 30 minutes]

Zack and I are sitting at the table. I’m photoshopping (I was photoshopping the new banner at the top of the website), and Zack was doing some form of coding on his. It was boring and involved lots of 0’s and 1’s and random letters and stuff. I saw it and said to myself, “that’s making my brain melt, my screen has pretty colors on it.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but apparently I said it to Zack and not to myself. Oops.

Then those high schoolers and their high school funk showed up. Our Internet speed suddenly slowed to a crawl. The Starbucks went from having 3 laptops and 2 iPads running to about 7 laptops and 5 iPads.

And one of those people was doing the unthinkable on their electronic device.

Keep in mind, this is Starbucks in the middle of the day. Not someone’s house in the evening. What this person was doing was horrible. It breaks about 4 social norms and several Starbucks Internet policies. Well, it might not actually be a policy, but it should be if it’s not!

This person was streaming a movie.

A movie. They were watching a movie. In Starbucks. Possibly a TV show.

They sucked up our precious Internet speed so they could watch Gossip Girl on Netflix. In Starbucks. In the middle of the day.

I’m assuming it was Gossip Girl. The kind of people who watch it are generally the same kind of people who would thoughtlessly take up bandwidth from everyone else. Jerks.

Zack and I went back to doing our Internet-related things, just at a much slower pace.

[fast forward 20 minutes]

20 minutes have passed and the Internet is slower than before; Zack and I are getting antsy. So we do what any disgruntled mature 20-somethings would do, we hatch a plan to fix the problem.

We figured out right away that announcing our Internet problems to the crowd wouldn’t go over well. Then Zack started speaking in code. Seriously, he started rattling off website coding code, it sounded like he was having a Spock-meets-Sherlock verbal seizure. Had I not been so irked, it would’ve been pretty entertaining.

After he finished talking to himself 3 minutes later, we hatched another plan. We decided to open up a bunch of Hulu and YouTube videos and suck up the internet even more, hoping it would slow down the sucky person’s TV show enough to make them leave, or to at least stop watching it.

Well… It sort of worked. We opened up a ton of videos, and none of them would load. Why? They wouldn’t load because the sucky person’s TV show was slowing it down. They were foiling our plan without even knowing it! Realistically, we were slowing ourselves down with all of the video tabs open. But that didn’t comfort us in our time of irritability.

Fortunately, that person had some friends show up and he closed his iPad. However, our Internet still didn’t speed up. After another few minutes of spiteful frustration, we realized our Internet was probably slow because we never closed all of those video tabs.

We closed them…and the Internet sped up.

A few minutes later we realized all of that irritation had made us hungry. So we left to find food. We went to the only food establishment worth going to at a time like that, Little Caesars.

As soon as we walked through the door at Little Caesars the cashier said hi and guessed what we wanted. She was right, surprisingly enough.

Neither Zack nor I could have possibly predicted the next words to gush out of her mouth: “I listen to your podcast and read your blogs all the time! Zack, you’re much taller than you sound; your wife is super lucky to be stuck with you for life. Adam, you really are adorable in person. I always thought you were kidding! Holy cow, and you guys totally have a Sherlock-Watson height and personality type thing going on. This is so cool!”

I crack myself up with my sarcasm sometimes. She didn’t say anything like that at all, regardless of how accurate those statements are.

But she did say something. She said, “You guys are kind of regulars here. You eat here a lot.” Zack and I were both flattered and slightly worried about becoming regulars at a pizza chain. We left, and then I ate more cheese and breadsticks than I care to admit.

All in all, it was a good trip to Starbucks. And I should probably consider better portion control when it comes to pizza.