Rethinking my assault on the institution of coffee

A follow-up to my attack on the institution of coffee from yesterday: A reader on Goodreads responded to my post with the following:

“Coffee is also a ritual, a comfort. I know I can get through a tough commute, a tough meeting, a tough report or a tough day in general if I have that coffee.

I wonder if the bigger problem is the over-sharing that goes on in social media?”

She might be onto something. As I was forced to point out several times yesterday, my post was not an attack on coffee or the act of drinking coffee, but on the way in which people insist on talking about it, tweeting about it and raising it's status in society to unreasonable levels.

It was an assault on the institution of coffee, which I thought I made pretty clear in the title of the post.

Enjoy your coffee as much as I enjoy my Caffeine-free Diet Coke, but do I have to hear about it every damn day?

So I think the Goodreads’ reader is right, or almost right.  It’s not the over-sharing that bothers me, but the unnecessary-sharing.

The boring-sharing.

For example, I watched a woman ask for 12 creams and 12 sugars in her small coffee this morning at Dunkin Donuts (I was getting coffee for my wife).

As I stood in line, I tweeted about it, because I thought it was a highly unusual and slightly insane request. I also noted the courage it must have taken to make a request like this.

And my tweet got a response. People couldn't believe it. It made a guy who drinks his coffee black scoff in disgust. It made another one laugh.

The aforementioned reader on Goodreads even responded:

12 creams and 12 sugars means it was no longer coffee, more like a vaguely coffee-tinted beverage.

Then I laughed.

This seemed like the right kind of coffee-sharing situation to me. It was unique. Odd. Possibly amusing. Maybe even conversation-inducing.

"Need. Coffee. Now." or "This is going to be a three-cup day!" or "I need my Starbucks right this minute!" are none of these things.

They are nowhere close to these things.

These kinds of comments only serve to glorify the need for coffee, and as I’ve said before, I get it.

You all need your coffee.

Fine.  Drink up.

And please shut up unless you have something new to say.