Coffee Through Divine Intervention
For the past two years or so, I've been mistakenly getting emails from a church somewhere in Virginia. I've never been to this town, let alone this church. (For the record, I'm not really religious either, haven't been to church since I was a kid). It looks like its somewhere out near the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I'm still not sure how they accidentally got my email. My guess is that someone who is part of that church has a very similar name or something. Anyways, for these past two years, I've been politely writing the pastor and informing him that he has the wrong email and I would appreciate being taken off the list. Every time, he replies with something along the lines of "I'm so sorry, I'm trying to figure out how to get you out of my computer". Its only a light annoyance, as they all go to an email account I don't really use anymore, so I don't really care either way, but more and more I just feel for him, as I watch him clearly struggle to figure out how to do something that I think is so simple.
So when I received another of these emails the other day, to my surprise, it came in the form of a gift. I was certain it was spam at first, and was hesitant to look at it, but when I deduced that it was in fact real, and came from a real address, found a $25 Starbucks digital gift card with the note Thank you for your patience, I can't seem to get you out of my computer! Just for fun, because I still didn't believe it was real, I decided to go to the Starbucks down the street from my apartment (something I never do, as I've always been pretty anti-Starbucks) and try to use it. I picked out 2 lbs of coffee, about $30 worth, and brought them up to the barista to pay for them. I noticed immediately that the barista's name was also Sam, which felt uncanny, a good sign of some sort. I kept my story of coffee through divine intervention to myself though, and just hoped that this digital gift card would work. It did. I ended up paying the difference of $4 or so, and wrote back this pastor thanking him for the gift.
Now I'm sipping the special 1971 roast from Starbucks, and thinking about my entire life as a barista, delivery person for roasters, all the years I spent being very pretentious about my coffee, and remembering drinking very similar tasting Starbucks coffee and Peets coffee in my pre-barista teen years in the 2000s. It feels very much like I've come full circle, and now, especially with the price of coffee being out of control and every specialty roaster doing their own takes on the latest trends like anaerobic naturals and various new processes to make decaf coffees excellent, I have a rekindled appreciation for just buying a bunch of relatively cheap coffee, and enjoying it at home on a weekend, off from work, feeling generally like I did 15 or 20 years ago.
I won't go on about why I love cheap coffee, because well, I already did, but felt this was a really interesting story to share. I no longer feel annoyance from getting these emails from this unknown church somewhere in the foothills of the mountains of Virginia. When I see the emails now, I'll feel a little less annoyed and a little more grateful knowing that this is a congregation of probably pretty decent people, and I'll remember when he graciously bought my coffee for a good few weeks.
Let's be easier with each other. Let's remember that even though something is easy for us, like taking a name mistakenly added to an email list off said list, someone else may feel like that is akin to pushing a Sisyphean boulder up a mountain.