For Want of a Dime...

If a chain of events leads to my ultimate loss of house, job, family, and friends, we can trace it down to today, this historic day.

Anyone who lives in Minnesota and drinks coffee has inevitably spent some money at Caribou Coffee and probably tried to answer the daily trivia question. For those of you who haven't, there is a trivia question that changes each day and is unique to each location. If you get the question right, you get ten cents off your order.

When I ride the bus to work it drops me off right in front of a Caribou Coffee and part of my morning routine is to get my cup of coffee there and try and save a dime.

Because I am a nerd, I get excited about the trivia question and try to set personal records for how many consecutive days I can save a dime. My record is nine days, and my hitting streak came to an end when I was stumped by the question "How much dirt does a human consume, on average, in a year?" That's a bullshit question, because anything over say, half a centigram will be alarming and disgusting and we all know that the answer will be much higher than that.

So the question might as well have been "Pick a random number between .5 centigrams and 12988347 kilos and if you are right, you get ten cents off your order." I refused to answer that question out of protest, thus breaking my streak. I sure showed them with my silent protest!

But in the interest of full disclosure, at the Caribou I go to, the questions are usually quite easy for anyone with a high school diploma and a functioning long-term memory. Typical questions are "What is the capital of New York?" or "What story is attributed to Homer besides The Oddessy?" and things like that.

So my most recent streak is up to four days and today's question was "Who is the only United States President whose face is on two separate types of US currency?"





I thought it over for a few seconds, made my coffee order and said the answer was Thomas Jefferson.





The guy at the counter said, "Sorry. Good guess" Then held up a penny and five dollar bill from the cash register to show me the correct answer was Lincoln. Very dramatic.

I am the horse's asshole when it comes to all forms of competition, and I was about to prove this. I said, "Do you happen to have a two dollar bill and a nickel in there?"






I was half-joking, and was going to leave it at that. But he went ahead and told me that Thomas Jefferson's presence on the two dollar bill doesn't count because it's not in circulation anymore. I was satisfied with that answer even though I had no idea if that was true or not. But then his co-worker said, "Actually the two dollar bill is back in circulation but the book was written before that happened."





Now I have no idea what The Book is. I assume it's either The Bible (which I'm pretty sure was written before the two dollar bill was re-circulated by the US Treasury) or Caribou publishes a book of possible trivia questions for employees to use.

Either way, I'm back in this conversation, trying to get my dime back. "So Thomas Jefferson is also correct!" I say.

"Well we have to go with what the answer in The Book says," she answered, pointing vaguely to some object under the cash register, which I assume is either Gideon's Bible or Caribou Coffee Inc. Official Daily Trivia Manual. And the conviction with which she said this made me think maybe it was The Bible afterall. She clearly was not going to go against the authority of the answer in The Book, no matter how illogical it was.

Either way I got screwed. Open letter to Caribou Coffee: I want my freaking dime back.






So back to my origninal point, for want of a dime, the bus fare was lost, for want of a bus fare... Well you can connect these dots all the way to me losing wife, dog, house, job, and friends if you please.

In working with adults and teens who stutter I have found that those who feel they are victims and were let down by God have the absolute worse prognosis. I would say the degree to which a person plays The Victim is the number one factor in how much he can improve his or her own life. This is true in all realms of life. Not just stuttering.

However, I am here to say, that if my life goes to the shitter over the next, oh, 50 years, I blame Caribou.