Starbucks and globalisation in general

I am writing in reverse order about my day. This is about the ride home from the APEC rally.

Once I got over the bridge at Darling Harbour, I spotted a Starbucks and decided this was a good time for a coffee - especially a coffee from a voracious multi-national, even if it does serve fair trade muck from time to time.

I should have been dissuaded by this sign out the front. Who on earth wrecks a perfectly good macchiato by putting caramel in it? Who even dreams up stuff like that?

They'll be the first up agains the wall when the revolution comes....


Here we have a Starbucks coffee shop that is not on fire, does not have smashed windows, and is open to serve customers.



The Starbucks even has three other globalised food joints next door - a sushi place, a wok joint and of course, the Golden Arches. I am looking forward to hearing a lecture about the evils of globalisation from someone that is sitting down to a big meal of sushi, or chowing down on some chow-mein.



Here is my coffee, which cost $3.15. That's 85 cents more than I paid at Pane e Vino. Or maybe 65 cents. I forget. What I do know is that for less money, Pane e Vino, like most cafes, makes much better coffee than Starbucks. This little tub of brown stuff was completely bitter and crap. And to add insult to injury, it was a "tall macchiato". How do you create a "tall" macchiato? The bleeding thing is only supposed to be about 1.5 inches from top to bottom - that's not tall in my book. A macchiato is supposed to be short - and the shorter the better.



As I sat there sipping my completely hideous coffee, a stealth chopper flew by. It must have been stealthy because, look at my photo - you can barely see it. I figure that the cloaking device must have been compromised.



Now that I have taken off my tinfoil, I can state that the only reason this photo is blurry is because it was taken on maximum zoom (10x on my Canon Ixus) and the Ixus takes totally rubbish photos if you zoom anymore than 3x. I don't know why they bother with telling you it can zoom to 10x. Canon must have the same dickheads working in their marketing department as Starbucks. I love the camera, but I hate the zoom function. I almost never use it if I can help it.

"Hello dear, what did you do at work today?"

"I thought up a completly useless feature to list on the front of the box containing our latest product!"

"Well done dear. You are a credit to the human race. Innovation is what drives society forwards. What does this feature do?"

"Nothing. Well, at least nothing useful. But all our competitors list it as a feature on their product, so we have to list it on ours."

"Do their features work?"

"No. But once one of them started listing it in order to gain an advantage over the rest, we all had to include it. I tell you what, the poor buggers in the labs had to work overtime to get that feature working to the point where we could include it without being sued for misrepresentation."

"That's nice dear. How did the job interview at Stabucks go today?"

"It was hard. They made me sit down and think of two new coffees on the spot!"

"What did you come up with?"

"Tuna flavoured latte and an extra double-tall yak's milk flat white infused with lemon."

"Will anyone ever drink that?"

"There is a core population of poseurs that will drink anything we produce. They won't just drink plain old coffee like the plebs do."

"Well, I hope you get the job. As I keep on telling you, I think the world is ready for goat's milk latte."

There are times I wish for an old SLR camera with say a 300mm lens on it for the long distance work, but then I think about the problems of stuffing such a camera into the elastic pocket on the back of my cycling shirt. You may succeed in getting it in, after a great deal of struggle and strife, but I can guarantee that you will never get it out.

Do my legs look fat in this black Lycra stuff?



I also decided that I would pass the time by photographing everyone that went past me on a bike. I had passed dozens of bikes going into town, and even passed a good handful or more just crossing the bridge.

I sat there for about 10 minutes, even making some phone calls to keep me busy, and this is how many cyclists I saw.

Zero.



I very nearly didn't make it home in one piece. I went into the bus parking area of the National Maritime Museum, which is just next to Darling Harbour, and almost got taken out by this boom gate. I just didn't see it - it might as well have been piano wire stretched across the road.

As I stood there, rather shakily, taking this photo of the demon boom gate, the speaker on the pole across the road started talking to me. It was saying, "This is security, what do you want?" and that was repeated time and again. I had obviously tripped some kind of sensor when I almost decapitated myself on the gate.

I figured that I had probably sparked off some sort of alert, so I packed away the camera and hotfooted it out of there.



Here's a car carrier coming in to whatever this dock is called just under the ANZAC Bridge. The dock, or wharf, is covered in Gaia-rapers from one end to the other. Light trucks and vans beloved by small business - the engine of economic growth. And here is another shipload of them coming in. I thought that was a perfect endcap to the day.



Until I had almost made it home. That's when I just about ran into these three. What is it about women, when out for a walk in a group, that makes them want to fill the available pathway from one side to the other? This is a shared bike/walking path, so I am quite entitled to come up behind them and yell obscenities at them. I'm too nice to do that - but I can feel another letter to the local paper brewing within me.