Tag Archives: Coke

Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite

I hate it when you go out to a restaurant and all they have to drink is Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite. That’s all we serve at my restaurant. The royal triumvirate of boring sodas. It’s like I can just picture whoever started the place, they’re considering all of the locally selected ingredients for each carefully plated dish. And then right after they finish planning the menu, one of them says, “Oh wait, we forgot to go over beverages.”

sotriumv

The other guy goes, “What do you mean, like soda? Just get Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite.” And that’s it. It’s like there’s no imagination at all, not even the possibility that you might branch out even a step into the wider world of soft drinks.

And this isn’t anything against Coke. It’s great. I hate Diet Coke, but whatever, that’s not a fight I’m willing to pick, because people love Diet Coke, and so yeah, not my cup of tea. I do love Coke Classic. But I love cheeseburgers also. It doesn’t mean I want every meal to be a cheeseburger. Nor do I want every drink I have to be a Coke.

I just don’t get it, because there are so many more interesting sodas besides Coke and Sprite. How did we wind up as these two being the standard? It’s like ice cream, you’ve got vanilla and chocolate. Hot drinks, it’s coffee and tea. And for soda, you’ve got whatever flavor Coke is supposed to be and then lemon-lime.

You ever go to a restaurant and ask if they orange soda? Or Mountain Dew? You won’t even get a response right away. The waiter or waitress is just going to stare at you for a little while, to communicate as passive-aggressively as they can, are you kidding me? Are you seriously asking me if we have orange soda or Mountain Dew? Of course we don’t. Of course we only have Coke or Sprite. What the hell is your problem?

I know this because I’m a waiter, and I can’t stand it when people waste my time, “What kind of soft drinks do you have?” And what do I do? I don’t want to be a dick. I don’t want to be like, you’re an idiot, we only have Coke, Diet Coke and Sprite. But that’s all we have. Sure, I can mention unsweetened ice tea, I can throw in seltzer, but that’s it, everybody’s left deflated by the interaction. I don’t know what you were expecting.

But why is artificial orange flavor that much different than artificial lemon and lime flavor? Why is it socially acceptable to have a brown or a clear carbonated beverage in front of you at a restaurant while a green or a neon yellow one would make it look like you snuck out to Pizza Hut to order a soda to bring back to the table?

Cream soda, root beer, grape soda, Dr. Pepper, there are so many alternative soda flavors we could add to the standard restaurant drink menu to make everything more interesting. But no, you’re lucky if you go to a restaurant that has ginger ale.

Every restaurant by me, they proudly serve at least forty-five craft beers on tap. The wine gets its own telephone book sized menu. Bourbons, scotches, spirits, hold on, let me get the liquor manager to come over and give you a history lesson on single malts vs. blends. But soda? We’ve got Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite. It’s not fair. I love soda. I would love to have some variety when I feel like enjoying a sugary carbonated beverage.

No more free refills on soda

At the restaurant where I wait tables, management recently got rid of the soda fountain. Whereas before five dollars would get you unlimited Coke and Diet Coke, now five dollars gets you one twelve ounce bottle of soda. Whatever, I was all bent out of shape about it initially. I hated having to explain a stupid change in soda policy to every single table that I wound up serving.

bottled soda

“What is this?”

“We recently switched to bottled …”

“So no more free refills?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK. But I hate you. And I’m not tipping you. And I’m going to follow you home and egg your house. Asshole.”

OK, nobody actually said that last one to me, not explicitly. But I’d stand there and smile and bullshit about how, “We really just want to make sure you’re enjoying an optimal soda drinking experience,” and I could tell these people wanted me dead. They don’t care about quality. If you’re a Diet Coke drinker, you’re not in some sort of a quest for quality. It’s super popular, yeah, everybody drinks it, but come on, does anyone truly enjoy Diet Coke? What is that taste? It’s like a battery that’s been left out to rot out in some old socks for a decade before accidentally being dropped into a vat of Coke Classic.

I’m getting carried away. I realize that now. A couple of months have passed and our customers have since gotten used to no longer receiving unlimited, intravenous Coca-Cola, and so I don’t have to talk about it all that much anymore. But at the time, man was I pissed. I was so angry. I came right home after that first shift and wrote a whole blog post about how much I hate bottled soda, how much I hate my managers, how the restaurant industry is this giant scam.

I sat on it for a couple of weeks, I always sit on my writing for a couple of weeks, and it’s a good thing too. Because I reread my diatribe against the soda policy and I scratched my head, like, huh, I was getting all bent out of shape over this? Over Diet Coke? Come on. That’s lame.

Although I am pissed off that I don’t get to drink free soda anymore. That used to be a really minor perk of working where I work. Every five minutes or so I’d fill up a huge glass of seltzer and I’d pound it down, enjoying that crazy sensation of those bubbles trying to go every which way, up my nose, down my throat. I’d close the back of my throat and squint my eyes really hard, because you know, just try chugging any carbonated beverage, that’s no joke. But it would pass and I’d feel instantly refreshed and recharged.

Now I can’t do that anymore. Before I had a perk. Now, there’s no perk. And I’m not being dramatic. I tried chugging a glass of plain water, and I almost quit right there. One, it’s boring. There’s absolutely nothing going on with a glass of plain water. Two, there is no two. It’s just one, water is boring. No bubbles, no fun.

I also tried switching to unsweetened iced tea, and that worked for about two hours. I’d fill up a glass, squeeze a lemon, and I’d get that refreshment, I liked the added caffeine kick. But you ever try downing more than two large glasses of unsweetened iced tea in a short time? Man, it’s like I boarded an express train to upset-stomach central. I had to sit down. I thought I caught some sort of a virus.

Finally, I’d like to end with a little anecdote. So we have bottles of soda, which means tons of empty bottles that we’re throwing straight in the trash. I can’t believe restaurants can get away without recycling that much plastic. I think that if I tried that in my house, the city would give me a fine. Anyway, this one waiter started collecting all of the soda caps.

I was like, hey man, what are you doing? And he was like, “Oh, well, you see these codes under the caps? If you type them into the Coca-Cola web site, they’ll donate .0001 cents to the charity of your choice.”

I was like, wow, thanks, I guess. But what I was really thinking was, Coke, you’re willing to donate all of this money to charity, but only if some random person gets on his or her computer and types out a long string of nonsense onto the Internet? Don’t be an asshole, Coca-Cola. Either donate to charity or don’t donate to charity. Don’t condition you’re philanthropy on whether or not you can get complete strangers to sit at their computers and do a bunch of mindless, unproductive busy-work.

A message from my corporate sponsors

Folks, I’ve decided to monetize this whole blogging experience, and so I’ve agreed to start lacing my writing with product placements. Not to worry though, I’m such a talented writer that I can assure you the built-in advertisements will blend in seamlessly with my award-winning prose. It’s like you won’t even know you’re being marketed to. Like when you’re eating a delicious bowl of Kashi breakfast cereal, you’re thinking to yourself, I can’t believe how smoothly our friends at Kashi have combined great taste with all of these all natural ingredients. Talk about getting your day off to a great start. Vitamins, minerals, all of the good complex carbs and proteins. That’s what you need to fuel your day. Or lunch. There’s nothing wrong with having cereal for lunch. Or even dinner. You’re hungry, you’re hungry. Kashi’s a great choice any time of the day.

That’s what this new approach is going to be like. You’ll say to yourself, wow, I just read a whole piece and I couldn’t even tell I was being sold on something. Obviously the blue highlighted hyperlinks might stand out somewhat, but just try not to think about them. Just read my blog posts for the same entertainment that you know you’re always guaranteed to experience. Just like when you watch House of Cards on Netflix. You’re not thinking about streaming video or what device you’re watching it on. You’re thinking to yourself, how have I lived my life so far without watching this groundbreaking new show? Compelling drama. Gripping narrative. Like it grips your imagination. Like Goodyear Tires grip the road, regardless of the terrain, rain or shine, you know your vehicle is in good hands.

Invariably there are going to be some people not happy with this new arrangement. They’ll call me a sell out. They’ll accuse me of promoting products and services that maybe I don’t even really like, that maybe I’m just bowing to corporate pressure, to increase traffic to a particular web site, or to draw attention to a paying sponsor. But that’s not what I’ve ever been about, and that’s not what I’m ever about to be about. It’s about delivering quality content to you, the reader. It’s about uncompromising values, about standards. It’s like TD Ameritrade, when they put together a portfolio of investments, you know they’re not sacrificing quality over profit. Just like Tommy Lee Jones and that guy from Law and Order tell you on the commercials: you’re putting your money somewhere you can trust, with people you can count on.

It’s about me writing new and fresh content, it’s about me not making the same joke over and over again, paragraph after paragraph, highlighting some random company, pretending they’re my corporate patron, making a generic sounding complement about them, and then linking to them. You’re gong to enjoy what you read here. Like you enjoy Coke. I love Coke. And Mountain Dew. I love Mountain Dew also. See? That’s different. Coke and Mountain Dew are clearly owned by two separate companies, and so they both wouldn’t pay to advertise on the same site, in the same paragraph. One of those is a paid shout-out, one of them my own opinion. See I can have it both ways. I can still write and have a voice and …

Hold on, I just got an email. I was wrong. I don’t like Mountain Dew at all. It’s gross. Too much sugar. And remember that whole thing about yellow number five? Doesn’t it decrease your sperm count?

Wait a second, another email. I actually had that mixed up. Coke is the problem here. Those bunch of fascists. Mountain Dew has always been one of my favorite soft drinks. And the sperm count thing? Yellow five actually increases your sperm count. Helping America, helping the next generation. Mountain Dew.

Readers, I guarantee that you’ll still be entertained every day. And if you get pointed to some quality products in the meantime? That sounds like a win-win to me. Like those big cans of Arizona green tea. The first win is that it’s only ninety-nine cents. The second win is after you take your first sip and realize just how delicious and refreshing your beverage is. The third win, so yeah, it’s actually a win-win-win, is when you finish that last sip, still want more, but realize that, because it’s so cheap, you can keep buying them and drinking them without pause. A true win-win-win.

And that’s what I’m going to offer. I thank you for your continued support, and look forward to offering only the finest of endorsements. Also, I’m thinking of paying some marketing firm to pay other blogs to mention my blog in their blog posts. Does that sound like a good idea? You think it might boost traffic? Let me know. Let’s go viral. Let’s get this going viral.

Stop bossing me around. You’re not in charge of me. Don’t tell me what to do.

Don’t tell me what to do. You’re not the boss of me. There’s only one person that’s the boss of me. There’s only one person that I’ll listen to. And that one person is nobody. I won’t listen to anybody. If you ever tell me what to do I’ll just do the exact opposite. Unless of course you’re thinking that can fool me into doing whatever you want by telling me to do the opposite. In this case I’ll recognize your true intent behind the clever semantic trick, and I’ll do what you’re telling me to do, but only because I’ll know that you’re really wanting me to do the opposite and so, yeah, just do me a favor and don’t tell me to do or not to do anything, because I’ll never listen. Like I’ll listen, I’ll hear you, but I’ll willfully do whatever it is that you don’t want me to do, regardless of how you phrase it. What I’m getting at here is, you’re not in charge of me.

I’m not being defiant. Well, I am being defiant. Or maybe you’re the one being defiant. And don’t even try to be nice to me, because it’s still bossing me around, and I’m not somebody that you can just come up to and say, “Hey Rob, it’s so nice to see you. Have a seat and let me get you a drink.” All right? Because, one, don’t tell me to sit down. If I want to sit down, I’ll sit down without you having to tell me to have a seat. And two, let you get me a snack? How about let me let you watch me get myself a snack. Because who says you’re in charge? What are you the mayor?

I went to vote for President last month, and when I got the ballot, it told me to “fill in the box completely.” Stupid piece of paper. If I’m not going to listen to a person, if I’m going to ignore that joker who tried to get me to stand in line, to sign my name at the bottom of that form, to stop asking other people who they were going to vote for, to please stand behind the curtain, to give the other people their privacy while casting their votes, what makes you think I’m going to listen to a dumb piece of paper? I don’t get bossed around by people, I’m definitely not getting bossed around by a piece of paper. You know who wrote that piece of paper? Some clown, trying to tell everybody what to do. You know where that piece of paper came from? A tree. Who do you think I am, standing on line all day so I can get told what to do by a tree? By a dead tree?

Come on, I bought a can of Coke and I was just about to take a big sip when I noticed on top of the can, on top of the logo it said, “Enjoy” Coca-Cola. Get the fuck out of here. Why don’t you enjoy Coca-Cola? I’m the one who paid a dollar for that can. And now I’m getting forced into reading some sort of a simplified instruction manual? Enjoy? I made a grimace, a really strong face and I choked that Coke down, purposefully making myself laugh halfway through that big gulp, laughing so hard that the Coke, all of those bubbles, they got caught up in my nose and started spraying everywhere, and it hurt, it was all up my sinuses, and there was Coke all over my hands, and it dried and just got really sticky. Nosiree, I most certainly did not enjoy that can of Coke. And I went online afterwards to write a strongly worded email to Coke, to tell them to just sell me a can of soda without all of the fascism, the bossing around, but I got distracted by a feature on the web site that showed pictures of Coke cans throughout the ages, and this one can from a long time ago, it didn’t even say “Enjoy,” it just said, “Drink.” Fuck that shit.

Do you know how much of a fit I used to throw in kindergarten when my teacher put on the hokey pokey? Put this in, put that in, do this, do that. I can’t bring anything on an airplane, because I’m not about to let some flight attendant tell me to put it away during takeoff. When I’m driving I’ll stop at every green light and go at every red one. What else … do you know how many trains I’ve missed, walking up to the car when that conductor goes, “All aboard!” Chill out dude, and don’t tell me what to do. So I’ll just turn around. You get all aboard. Bossy control freak jerk.

I just donated a pint of blood and smoked a whole pack of cigarettes right after. Because try and guess what that nurse told me to avoid for about an hour or so after the donation. Just guess. Yep. Smoking. Just, seriously, don’t boss me around. Just stop telling me what to do. Just leave me alone and don’t talk to me and don’t tell me to do or not do anything.

Nothing better than an ice cold Coke

I’ll grab a cold drink out the fridge. I’ll open a bottle of soda or beer and just as the cap makes that pop sound I think to myself, how totally ridiculous is it that I can have cold carbonated beverages on demand? I don’t think like this all the time, just once in a while. Usually I’m thinking about or how crazy it is that we all have the Internet, how we have all of this information and media at our disposal, how we don’t have to buy CDs anymore, how we don’t have to buy stamps. How we’re the first generation being this close to instant material gratification. I’ll be really thirsty and I’m just enjoying a nice ice cold Coke Classic, and I’ll stop and think about all of this, and it’s equally absurd to think about even all of the small stuff, like a bottle of Coke, that I have at my fingertips.

What did people drink a hundred years ago? Water? That’s it? Juice maybe? What goes into carbonating stuff? How did it become so commercially successful to add bubbles to everything? I know that if you make beer from scratch the bubbles are produced naturally. But soda? How did the first sodas get bubbly? And beer now isn’t even made from scratch, it’s made in these big vats and then they boil it to kill all the active yeast and then they add all of the CO2 artificially.

That’s really not important though. It’s just when you consider progress, and I’m considering it right now, I wind up thinking that we’re so special, that we’re this pioneer generation, the first ones to benefit from all of the stuff available now, the first this, the first that. But soda is a pretty recent invention. So is refrigeration. When Coke came out didn’t it cost like a nickel a bottle? I have no idea. My grandfather always used to talk about stuff that cost a nickel when he was a kid, so I just have all of these sepia colored imagined memories of the past where everything’s five cents, and people are still complaining about it being too expensive.

But imagine you’re living back in the day when Coke first came out, and it’s super cheap. Everyone must have felt like a king. Or a queen, you know, if you were a lady. But it must have felt great to walk into a drugstore and buy a bottle of Coke. And you could stand outside and find some empty milk crate or some box and you could put one leg up on that milk crate and you could rest your arm, the same arm that’s holding the bottle of Coke, you could rest it on your raised knee and take a big sip of ice cold Coke and think to yourself, Jesus, this has to be the pinnacle of human development. And that first year that Coke was available, like really available, to every single person, it must have been such a great year, everyone really appreciating every sip of ice cold carbonated soft drink.

But then Sprite probably came out and maybe it was still kind of exciting, but it definitely couldn’t have been as exciting. And then even though soda was available, there were plenty of other things that weren’t available, like penicillin, or modern dental care, and the buses were still segregated, and maybe you’d get drafted into a war and maybe you’d run out of nickels and you wouldn’t even be able to buy a Coke, you’d just be back to plain old water.

And when I think all of this is so great, all of our modern technology, am I truly loving it? Am I really appreciating everything that we have that generations past have not had? Or is it not about the actual innovations, but just about that feeling, that feeling of having what once did not exist. Like when I first got an iPhone, man, that was something special. After a couple of years, it’s still somewhat special, but at the same time, it’s just my cell phone. I don’t have that better, superior feeling. And I get so wrapped up in my life, my world, I forget about all the stuff that’s comparable today to no penicillin and inequality and I don’t want to list the specifics of all of the negative aspects of the modern age, because I wouldn’t really be making any new or significant insights, and it would all be such a bummer, such a negative letdown.

I just can’t imagine what it’s going to be like towards the end of my life, how different the world is going to look. And how am I going to feel about the Internet in the future? Will it still seem so cool in comparison with whatever technological marvels the future will surely bring? Or maybe society will collapse and I’ll be telling my grandkids about the Internet, how it was the best thing our species had ever created, but civilization collapsed and now there is no Internet, and nobody knows how to get it back because we’re all too busy raiding these boarded up grocery stores, trying to sneak in and carry out cases of Coke and Sprite and Fanta without getting caught, because the Coke factory closed down when society closed down, and nobody knows how to carbonate the Coke, and you save all of your soda for wintertime, when you bury it under the snow, because there aren’t anymore refrigerators, well, there still are, but no electricity to run them. Some people have generators, but nobody’s refining oil into gas, and maybe there is no more gas, and so the snow trick is the only way for the average person to enjoy an ice cold Coke, and I think that, if I had to live in the burnt out remains of what was once a great civilization, no Internet, no TV, I think that an ice cold Coke would do just the trick, it would be just what I need, to close my eyes for a second, rest one of my legs up on some chair or stool, and just let it all wash down, the bubbles, the cold, the taste more than anything else of who we are and what we once had.