3/7/05
See that? That's the contents of a package that just came for me today, via UPS. Not a surprise, I knew it was coming. I ordered it online, myself, direct from the source.
Why? I've finally just given up on being able to find any of the tea that I want at any of the dozens of local grocers that service my area. And by 'service my area,' I mean 'screw me where I'll remember it most,' because it's become blazingly obvious that they have no interest in carrying any of the products I like.
And it's not like I'm some gourmand with really refined tastes. No, I'm a pretty standard consumer. It's just that I have this thing about tea. If you're going to call something 'tea', please let it be, you know... TEA. Dried leaves in boiled water.
As a tea drinker (sounds somehow unsavory, doesn't it?) , I've noticed a very aggravating development in the last few years: restaurants that claim to serve tea, but when you ask what they have, it's only something atrocious like "Blueberry Peach Mango", or something. Something with no actual tea in it.
Can people get it straight? When I order tea, I want tea. Lapsang Souchong, Ceylon Breakfast, whatever. I'll even take (gah) Lipton, if that's all you have. Just don't bring me some psychotic fruit infusion and call it 'tea.'
Could you imagine if you ordered a cup of coffee and they instead brought you boiled raspberry compote? I think we understand each other, now.
So, the local supermarkets - about fifteen within easy driving distance, with an astounding variety of two whole chains - have apparently fallen under the same tea delusion that most restaurants have. The tea section has been reduced to a few stray bags of Earl Gray Decaf, and then a really breathtaking assortment of non-teas. These infusions.
It sort of reminds me of the old Infocom text-based "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" computer game. For those not in the know, the game placed you in the shoes of Arthur Dent, and you had to solve a bunch of fiendishly difficult puzzles to avoid getting blasted into atoms, shoved into the vacuum of space, eaten by the Bugblatter Beast of Trall, or whatever.
Note: Spoiler Warning!
One of the central puzzles of the game featured a door that you had to get through. Now, in most games, you just had to fight a dragon to get a magic key, but in "HHG2G", in order to get through this door, you had to impress it, somehow.
See, the door (on a spaceship) led to a room where a robot lived, and you had to follow this robot into the room if you wanted to get a piece of equipment from it. The problem is that as soon as the Robot (Marvin, of course) entered the room, the door shut tight and would not let you pass. Because this was an intelligent door, and it was so impressed with Marvin's gargantuan intellect that it felt (quite rightly) that you weren't smart enough to be allowed to follow. And the only way to get it to open was to convince it that you WERE smart enough.
(Douglas Adams was a genius, but he was a mean bastard, too.)
Meanwhile, in a parallel game plot, you've desperately been trying to get the shipboard Food Replicator to make you tea. Calms the nerves, you know. This machine has been designed to give you any food or drink in the universe, based on your tastes and all other input. It's infallible. But, for some reason, it seems to be completely incapable of making you a cup of tea.
It just keeps providing you with a hot liquid that the game's interface is happy to inform you is 'entirely unlike tea'. And, just to get in a dig at your ineptitude, every time you checked your inventory list it read something like this:
"You have:
Babel Fish
Towel
Thing your Aunt gave you that you don't know what it is
Infinite Improbability Drive
Potted Petunia
No Tea."
So, finally - FINALLY - you buy the hint guide, and get the replicator to make you real, honest-to-goodness tea. And you look at your inventory to celebrate:
"You have:
Babel Fish
Towel
Thing your Aunt gave you that you don't know what it is
Infinite Improbability Drive
Potted Petunia
Tea."
Halle-freakin'-lujah!
And all the time this is going on, you keep showing the door everything that you've picked up in your adventures, in the hopes that it will be impressed enough to let you in. It's not. It's not even impressed by the fact that you've finally gotten some real tea.
The game, like most text games, had a standard feature: simply type in 'look', and the interface describes your surroundings, complete with any object that happens to be lying around that you can pick up and carry. So, after hours and hours of wandering around this ship and showing the door the kitchen sink, you wind up back in the Food Replicator room. You ask it to make you another cup of tea, which it now knows how to do.
Mmm. Calms the nerves.
Type 'look':
"You are in the Food Replicator room. The entrance to the bridge is on the right, and the entrance to the corridor is on your left. You see: No Tea."
Somehow, when the Replicator makes you tea, you end up PUTTING DOWN THE NO TEA that you've had in your inventory since the game started, several months ago. So, you pick up the 'No Tea'.
"You have:
Babel Fish
Towel
Thing your Aunt gave you that you don't know what it is
Infinite Improbability Drive
Potted Petunia
Tea
No Tea."
Argh. Back to the door. Type 'show door Tea and No Tea'. The door is completely blown over by this act of genius, and finally swings open for you.
This is a pretty accurate description of how I spent the years 1984-85, inclusive. Other people were dating cheerleaders, and I was trying to prove to a virtual door in a text-based game on my Apple IIc how smart I was.
Somehow, I think: even though I won the game, I'm just not all that smart, after all.
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Link: I got nothing.