Chapter Text
“Seven dollars for that?” Mike stares at Harold Gunderson and his 12-oz. coffee cup.
“It’s worth it,” Harold replies, widening his eyes plaintively and clutching it closer to his chest.
“Yeah,” Mike snorts, “keep telling yourself that.”
As the elevator opens he claps Harold on the back and walks through Pearson-Hardman, ignoring the glass-walled partners’ offices. He’s not here for the lawyers. He turns into the bullpen where he supposes associates once worked, now stormed by a mass of boisterous traders. As he edges around the ping-pong table and heads to his cubicle, he passes two other guys, gossiping over yet another coffee cup.
“I just got the new special,” one boasts, “a tall decaf cappuccino.”
“What’s he calling it?” the other one asks.
“‘Sense of Self,’” the first trader says with a shrug. “No idea why, but it’s the best cappuccino I’ve ever had.”
Mike closes his eyes and breathes in, willing himself not to comment on the coffee. He doesn’t succeed. “You’ve Got Mail.”
“What?” The traders turn to him, frowning.
“It’s from You’ve Got Mail. You know, Tom Hanks and his rant against Starbucks?” As they look at him in confusion, he sighs. “The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. People who don't know what the hell they're doing, or who on earth they are, can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino.”
“Huh.” They look back down at the coffee, slightly dazed.
Mike gestures at the cup. “Maybe the name’s ironic commentary on consumerism, maybe it’s a dig at Starbucks. Either way,” he admits, “it’s kinda clever.”
Shaking himself, he turns away to his six computer screens and swiftly reacquaints himself all the market data displayed there. Yet even as he gets down to work, his eyes drift back to the damn coffee cups, the one with the magical cappuccino, the 20oz. one that a harried-looking girl across the aisle rushes in with five minutes later. They’re all a distinctive charcoal gray embossed with gold lettering.
“The Coffee Disbar.”