A Story about Coffee

Chris wrote an entry about coffee and it made me think of this story.

My dad borrowed my white jeep cherokee years ago, for a few weeks. He always drank coffee in there. When I got the truck back, it was full of little black sugar ants. They were EVERYWHERE. I pointed these out to my dad, and he said, "Yeah? So what? Little black sugar ants ALWAYS live in cars."

And I had to explain, "No dad, they don't. It's something about you. I never saw a single little black sugar ant in my car before you borrowed it."

A few days later, he and I were at a diner somewhere and he opened a sugar packet into his coffee. Instead of grasping it at one end and shaking it to get all the sugar away from the end he intended to tear open, he just snatched up a sugar packet, held it over the coffee mug, and tore it right down the middle. He effectively burst the sugar packet rather than opening it. Sugar exploded out of it in a little cloud, and although most of it went into the mug, a good deal of it went all over the table. I watched him open a couple of sugar packets this way, slowly realizing why his cars are always full of little black sugar ants.

I asked him why he opened his sugar packets in that way, and he said, "To get to the sugar faster." When I explained to him that this must be what was drawing the sugar ants into his cars, he said, "Oh, they don't hurt anything."

HA! He's right. They don't hurt anything, but still!