I've been going to a lot of business meetings at Starbucks over the past six months.  My new company doesn't have a physical office in town, so I work from home. This means local business meetings not taking place at Large Corporate Telecom are usually located at Starbucks.

Today I was a little early.  I looked around at the Starbucks People.  You know who they are.  One impossibly hot young man sporting Abercrombie and studying some huge book.  Too old to be a straight-from-high-school college student.  Maybe a massage therapy student?  Maybe I just entertain too many fantasies.  A couple of young women in hipper-than-thou business wear talking on cell phones and looking EXACTLY like stock art - so much it sort of frightened me.  But then, something about Starbucks has always frightened me.

Even the tea is sort of hipper than thou.  I haven't been a coffee drinker since I was a heavy smoker - why are those two so linked? - so I've sort of taken to drinking tea in coffee places.  Starbucks carries a million and one kinds of tea, but even they know they can't charge more than $1.30 for the smallest size, which is huge.  So I got the smallest size and went over to sit on the big purple couch and ponder tea, how much I miss the local coffee place in Midtown where I used to go when I was camera-ready hip (or so I thought), the place that hosted people wearing Sunkist t-shirts that were actually held back from their original issue date and not screen printed to be sold at Kitson's for $134 a pop.  The coffee place where I went to write, or to trade lost-love stories with my new friends (everyone was a new friend back then, when I moved to a city where I knew no one), left very little room for cream. 

The place, I guess you could say, left very little room for cream.

Not like Starbucks.