Save the Earth! Free the Internet!

We are in Santa Fe at the moment and yesterday we wanted to sit and read and have coffee and we only found a Starbucks. We asked for brewed coffee, a tall. (This is small for those not schooled in this Starbucks BS.) We asked for a real cup since we planned to sit in the place and consume it. This seemed to completely baffle the Starbucks employee. She showed us a rather large ceramic cup and said she did have these but they held more than the tall (which is small remember).

"Do you just want me to put the amount of a tall in it?" she asked.

"Um, yes."

I didn't look and see if she used a disposable cup to 'measure' the amount. I couldn't have taken it if she did.

I guess Starbucks doesn't want to wash dishes. They want you to take those awful cups with the cardboard rings. And a plastic lid. Even to sit in the place and have your coffee. They are good citizens of the world, though. They have signs about how fair trade their coffee buying is and they sell this water from a company that purports to donate a nickel for each bottle to a charity that provides clean water to the third world.

Today I'm typing this in the Ecco Espresso and Gelato bar. The coffee automatically came in a ceramic cup when I said I was dining in. The sizes are 'Small, Medium and Large.' The wireless Internet is free. I'm using the Internet here because my fancy pantsy hotel purports to have wired Internet for $9.95 a day but it doesn't work in my room. I always check if there is Internet before picking a hotel. But sometimes they lie. We stayed last night in a less well-situated chain for about a third of the price. Free wireless. It would be funny if it weren't so sad. I like my high thread count sheets and fancy shampoos and soaps as well as the next person. I like a great location. But get the Internet together guys. I don't want to spend my vacation on customer support!