Divine Lunacy

Johnny walks in to a Dunkin Donuts and orders a ’small coffee’. What does he get? Well, that all depends on what the date is. Is it late spring, summer, or early fall, or are we into the cold months? Depeding on the time of year, johnny will get either a hot coffee or an iced coffee, without explicitly specifying either. Again without explicitly specifying his preferences, Johnny will get sugar and cream in his coffee. He neither ordered ice, nor cream, nor sugar, but he ended up with all three. Poor Johnny. All he wanted was a ‘Small coffee no cream; no sugar; no ice’. How was he supposed to know that he had to take all of those away? The moral of the story is that when in a Dunkin Donuts store, you should describe your coffee with as many words as possible.

In Google Search query language, johnny’s order might look something like:

small coffee -cream -sugar -ice

Even more fun than the query form of the order is the mathematical equation form:


small coffee = ground_coffee + hot + water + 2*cold + cream + sugar

cold = -hot

small_coffee = ground_coffee + cold + water + cream + sugar
Johnny_wants = ground_coffee + hot + water
Johnny_wants = small_coffee + 2*hot - cream - sugar


Looking at the equation form clearly demonstrates that Johnny must order postivie hot, negative cream, and negative sugar.

The whole point of the story is that I disagree with the way that evil corporation does things. When I walk into a Dunkin Donut store and order a ‘Small Coffee’, I am looking for a small amount of (crushed coffee beans+hot water). Even iced coffee starts hott. Icing the coffee is an extra step that should not be implied…

Hello, I’ll have a small Coffee plus heat, minus the quantity cream plus sugar.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 21st, 2005 at 1559:32 and is filed under Insights, Rants, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.