Blue Gold

There was a time when I used an obscene amount of water. I used to do most of my studying in the bath. The hot bath is the closest thing to tropical weather in the wretched northeast of the US of A. Used to fill it up – 30/40 litres at one go, and soak in it for hours, or for as long as it took for me to finish 1 more chapter of abstract algebra. But there were mitigating factors. Water was free. The city didn’t charge for it, because I was living in a sparsely populated small town which was next to a lake larger than Singapore. It will never run out of water. So that was OK.

I would never do the same thing in a city like Singapore – it’s a waste of water. If I were to live in a more urban place but cold climate I will have to think of different ways to keep warm.

And that is why I disapprove of gourmet coffee joints which use the dipping well to dump their barang. Can you imagine keeping the tap on all day just so that you can look good in front of your customers? And there are so many Starbucks in the US. My sis and I walked down the main shopping road of Denver and we counted 8 different Starbucks. Imagine each one wasting as much water as that!

Starbucks, Coffee Bean and Spinelli’s all have this problem. So I’ll boycott them. This is bloody ridiculous – water is getting more expensive and rare all the time, and those guys need to waste it like that?

And Starbucks – they had this practice where they could go to a coffee joint, and offer the landlord a higher price than the coffee joint was paying. Then they’d get the landlord to kick out that coffee joint. That is how many coffee joints went out of business.

Life has gotten kinda boring because I have boycotted cinemas for raising their prices. (And anyway films in cinemas are getting from bad to worse. I don’t know why distributors cannot get decent pictures in here anymore.) Now I am boycotting gourmet coffee joints as well. I could also boycott western food joints for using too much meat in their food. There’s nothing else I can do other than to go lim kopi at a coffee shop.

(After this article was written, Starbucks and Spinelli’s have changed their dipper well system. Fair enough, boycott over. Boycott still applies to Coffee Bean).