In the Boston Metropolitan system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the Dunkies, who ingest tbe caffeine; and the Dunkie Workers, who percolate those beverages. These are their stories.

As a reward for how great that whole joke is with the pic, please allow me to give a story from the one summer in college during which I worked at a Dunks. My memory usually isn't great, but this is very vivid in my mind even 10 years later.

I'm closing, and my coworker is out back taking his 30-minute break. This was an oddball North Shore location, and it would usually be totally empty for the last several hours of the day. A guy walks in and I'm oddly relieved to have something to do. This guy asks me what fruit-flavored coollattas we have. I tell him: we've got strawberry, watermelon, orange, and blue raspberry. He wants all 4 in an extra-large. I figure that's a bit strange, but who am I to judge? He stops me as I get ready to make it.

Then he asks me what fruit flavor shots we have. These are different from the flavor pump syrups - they're small shots of flavor concentrate that people only ever really get in hot coffee, and they only use like 2 of them of the 9 that we have. I tell him which ones are fruit: coconut, raspberry, blueberry, and peach. He wants those in the coollatta too. Okay, sure thing. Then he says he also wants one espresso shot, two skim milks, and one sweet-n-low. In the coollatta, of course. I make it for him. I can even remember opening and pouring the single futile packet of sweet-n-low into it. The whole time his face never betrays anything but sincere enthusiasm for this thing.

He pays and I hand him a Dunks XL cup of what can only charitably be described as brown fruit salad sugar sludge. It has the texture of the half-melted slush that gathers at the end of a driveway after the snowplows take their 6th pass down your street, and a shade of brown that reminded me of being seven years old and realizing I could combine all of my different paint colors together. Then the guy takes a sip. This man looks me right in the eyes, smiles a genuine grin, and says, "That's perfect, thank you so much!" And leaves.

Something changed inside me that day that I can't quite put my finger on. Never underestimate people; they'll always find new and exciting ways to surprise you.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk/film noir movie pitch.

anonymoosejuice

14d

Dahm Dahm

KGBspy

14d

https://www.myinstants.com/en/search/?name=law+and+order

Maximum_Activity323

13d

I always thought it was Buhm Buhm.

swni

14d