By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: March 7, 2012
“Oh no!” my empty double-double tells me, “You didn’t seem to quite manage to win this time! You know what? Play again. Please. I promise next time will work out for you.”
It’s that time of year again. The scarlet Tim Horton’s cups are everywhere. This is doubly true on campus, as it nears that time of year students start to consider caffeine a food group in and of itself.
All in all, it seems like a simple enough promotion – buy a hot beverage and have a chance to win the next one. Chances of winning, theoretically, are one in six. Well, Tim Horton’s, I have a beef. I’ve been rolling and rolling and rolling, and I have yet to see a message other than an entreaty to play again.
It’s not that I don’t drink a lot of hot beverages – I do. Let’s be serious; it’s that time in semester where caffeine is carrying 99 per cent of the student population through final papers and cramming sessions, and I am proudly part of that 99 per cent. Coffee is the new water. My beef about this isn’t because I bought a single coffee and am upset I didn’t win the Camry. Dear reader, I am currently at 17 losses and no wins. Not even a measly donut.
I might not be a math major, but my stats don’t match the stats Tim’s says I should have.
I mean, I’m not incredibly upset about this fact. It’s by happy chance that this time of semester (which requires larger amounts of caffeine than any other time of year) matches up with the Roll Up the Rim time period. This is most likely coffee I would have bought anyway. But I feel like I’m being kicked when I’m already down – not only can I not figure out this Spanish conjugation for the midterm I have in an hour, but I have to suffer through Tim’s condescending, simpering request to play again.
So I give another double-double a chance and it does the exact same thing. The empty cups pile on top of each other, like in some video games where tombstones pop up to mark where you’ve been slain. The pile keeps getting higher and higher. I begin to think my Tim’s cups are talking behind my back. I can’t even work in the same room. I compulsively take out the trash. Still, the tiny cardboard corpses of my past coffees haunt me. I can hear them whisper at me even through the plastic triangle walls of UFV’s new recycling receptacles. Please play again! Please play again! Please play again! I feel like there’s a line of ghostly, empty Timmy’s cups following me everywhere I go, as though I am a mother duck and these are my demented ducklings. Enough! Please play again? Since when is caffeine a game? I take my hot beverage seriously, and I’m tired of being tormented this way. Why am I braving this ferocious line in G building when I could have had cafeteria-brew beverage 20 minutes ago? Maybe I’ll go to Sodexo for my morning beverage tomorrow, huh? That would show you!
But I know that I won’t. Tomorrow morning, I’ll be in line with 20 or 30 other exhausted, tormented coffee-drinkers. Why? I don’t know. I’m torn, I really am. On one hand, I just want things to go back to the way they were: before rolling, before winning, when the only chance you had when buying a coffee was the chance to wake up and maybe pass your Spanish midterm.
On the other hand, I really want to win the car. Or even just a coffee. Tim, I just want to feel like a winner for a half-hour or so after successfully rolling up the rim, because God knows I’m still at a loss with this Spanish conjugation.
