By Chad Haines

Terrible things happen to people every day. In hindsight, I think I may not be one of the people as much as I am one of the terrible things. But you know what? Sometimes terrible things are wonderful.

My story starts with a slushy machine. You know the kind. They’re found in every gas station and contain swirling, colorful, semi-liquids. Most machines advertise a fruity concoction, but mine contained iced coffee and milk and an amount of vanilla syrup that will make you lose a foot to diabetes today.

It was a lovely machine. It doled out a sweet, frozen coffee drink for people who don’t like coffee (but think they do) so we baristas didn’t have to spend too much effort dealing with them.

This was in the chain coffee shop I worked at right out of high school. I had worked there for a couple of years and I had already learned all the ins and outs of the coffee world. I knew that some people like good coffee. Some people like bad coffee. Some people like to come in and just act like jerks to workers considered to be below them.

Then there’s people like Dan. Dan worked at the opposite end of the mall from my chain coffee shop in a women’s shoe store. He would come in five days a week for a black and white cookie, for a 20 oz frozen coffee, and to make wildly inappropriate comments to the female staff.

“The only way this would taste better is if it was on you,” Dan said to Melissa while spooning the whipped cream off the top of his drink with his tongue and desperately trying to make eye contact.

I should mention that my chain coffee shop was next to a chain pretzel shop. I never went into the pretzel shop because they had a roach problem. I know they had a roach problem because from time to time it would swell and spill over into my chain coffee shop through the cheap ceiling tiles.

One day we had just released a new frozen coffee drink that featured our frozen coffee poured into a plastic cup along with caramel, chocolate syrup, and crushed-up toffee bar. It was very popular. People were bringing them back to coworkers at such a pace that I quickly needed to go retrieve another stack of drink carriers from the top shelf of the stock room.

I set the cardboard drink carriers on the counter next to the espresso bar, and that’s when Melissa screamed that a cockroach had crawled out of the stack and onto the counter. I trapped the roach in a large plastic cup and we named him Fluffy. It was a sad way to entertain ourselves in a day full of people barking about how they were lactose intolerant and require almond milk but they don’t want to have to pay for it. Oh, but they still want whipped cream.

Rather than say, “You’re not lactose intolerant; you just have nothing exciting going on in your life so you’re faking a medical condition because you think it makes you more interesting,” I would ring them up and stare back at them with my dead eyes while they lectured me about how we have the wrong brand of artificial sweetener. Now and then I would glance over at the cockroach in the plastic cup and giggle to myself. Fluffy. Hehe. Who names a cockroach Fluffy?

That’s when Dan came in. I greeted him and he just kind of tolerated my existence because I didn’t have boobs and blonde hair. I took his drink order (he wanted the new frozen toffee drink) and I went to grab his black and white cookie from the pastry case. My sister, who worked at my chain coffee shop on her summer breaks, walked over to ring him up. She told him his total, which was higher than normal because of all the junk that his new drink came with.

After telling her she must have charged him wrong and that her college education would’ve been better suited for someone else, someone with a brain and a penis, he decided to go ahead and pay the extra ten cents anyway. Out of our tip jar. Dan is too good to us.

I had my back to Dan and my sister and was just getting ready to grab a plastic cup for his drink when I heard him tell her she’s “lucky she’s pretty.” I reached just a few inches past the stack of cups and grabbed the cup with Fluffy. I dowsed the cockroach in chocolate, caramel, and heath bar. Then I held the cup to the slushy machine spigot and pulled the handle. The 20 oz cup was soon filled to the brim with our new drink special with Fluffy hidden deep inside.

Dan walked away with his drink, back to his women’s shoe store. I pictured him finishing what he could with his straw before he had to dig the bottom one or two inches of soggy, crushed candy bar out with a spoon.

I was younger and dumber than I am now. But I’m still happy I did it. Fluffy will forever be a constant reminder to treat everyone with respect because one day you may accidentally piss off the wrong terrible thing.

For Fluffy.

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About Chad Haines

I’m not above or below the general public. Just because I found myself working in a coffee shop doesn’t make you better than me. I’m not an idiot, but it’s not like I can continuously announce my science degrees from accredited colleges. So when you treat me like an idiot or an inferior you run the risk of my feeding you a cockroach as an unspoken protest to your douchebaggery. My name is Chad by the way, and I’m a zoologist who runs around playing with animals, writing, and occasionally having to work menial jobs to catch up on my expenses. If you’d like to learn more about me you can stalk me on Twitter at @chadchaines or read my latest essay about getting stabbed in the penis at Full Grown People.