Eccentric Flower:199810/a regular customer gets burned

two october ninety eight eleven a m

a regular customer gets burned

This morning I stopped into my local Au Bon Pain to get my morning coffee before descending into the subway, as I do just about every weekday morning, and as I have done for the better part of five years.

The Pain serves their coffee in these square urns, like metal cubes with a screw top and a spigot attached. These are left on hotplates for the customers to serve themselves. For some reason they tend to adjust the feet on these hotplates so they're leaning forward at a dangerous angle - so the customers can get the last drop out of an urn more easily perhaps?

The customers need that, because there are five urns of coffee - two dark roast, two light, and one decaf - and the four urns with real coffee all seem to run out at the same time. Coffee is apparently subject to chained demand failure the same way that electricity is - when the person's favored kind of coffee runs out, they serve themselves from the other kind, which means that kind runs out faster. You might call it a brownout.

I got there this morning and several of the urns were in the back being refilled. I saw a row of exposed hotplates - and don't holler about safety, I assume a customer is smart enough to not put his/her arm down on a hotplate, so I don't consider that negligent (although OSHA might). And the counter is too high for children to reach.

The decaf was full, three urns were missing, and there were a few dregs of something in the fifth urn. I got my cup about one-third full before it, too, ran dry.

I stood back in frustration and waited for the staff to bring more out of the kitchen - if the urns were missing, it meant they already knew about the problem and were attending to it. A little red-haired lady in her sixties kept fiddling with the same urn I'd just drained, tilting it and shaking it. I didn't say, "It's empty, ma'am" ... she'd have wanted to try it for herself anyway. People are like that.

I noticed she was having trouble getting the urn to sit properly on the hotplate without threatening to slide forward and off, but she seemed to finally get it.

(You can sense the train wreck coming, can't you?)

About this time, the young thug-boy came out of the kitchen bearing a full urn of dark roast. Now, those things are heavy when full. He pushed past people in his hurry to set the urn down. He slammed it onto an empty hot plate - and the empty urn the woman had been fiddling with began to slide forward, heading for the floor and someone's foot. I caught it by its handle at the last second.

Then I reflected that fully one-half of my T-shirt - the entire front left side - was covered with hot coffee. And that there was some pain involved.

"Sorry about that," the thug mumbled. The red-haired lady was staring at me, and probably would have said something sympathetic, had I not put down my partially-full coffee cup and stormed out of the store.

I went back home to change T-shirts. Fortunately the coffee had miraculously not hit my overshirt. In the pocket of the overshirt was two rolls of film to be developed. If they had been ruined, I'd have been quite upset.

Now, here's the mystery. Where did the coffee come from?

It can't have come out of the sliding urn - that was empty. This was not a few drops of coffee on my shirt, this was about eight ounces' worth - a big splash. It can't have come out of the red-headed woman's cup - she hadn't been able to get any coffee yet.

That means it either came out of my cup - which seemed to have about the same amount as before, when I set it down in disgust - or it came out of the full urn, the dark roast urn - which seems unlikely, given how tightly the tops of those urns screw on.

Or another customer had been bumped aside, either by the thug or by the red-haired woman trying to get out of the way of the falling pot, and their coffee spilled on me.

Ah, who knows? At any rate, I now have a very mild burn, like a sunburn, in a cashew shape over my left nipple, and a slightly pulled muscle in my neck (probably from lunging to save the pot). And when I went back into the store after changing shirts to get my coffee, no one - not even the regular cashier who saw the whole thing happen and knows me on sight - said anything about it.

I don't want to sue or anything, but I feel like "sorry about that" is not a sufficient response.

Something odd occurred to my warped mind a little later. I wanted a little extra sugar this morning, so I put three miniature candy bars into my bag. I only wanted one - I was planning to eat the other two later in the day, I suppose.

As it turns out, I ate one on the way to get coffee, as planned; then I ate the second on the trip back to the house to change shirts; and I ate the third on the second trip back to the coffee place. One per trip.

Do you suppose, if I had randomly chosen to pack five little candy bars instead of three, I'd have had to return to my house twice this morning?

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