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That One Time Laura Almost Poisoned the President
I’ve been reading David Sedaris again, which makes me want to tell stories. Unfortunately, nothing interesting has ever happened to me. Probably the best story I know is actually about my friend Laura, who almost poisoned the president while taking a gap year in college.
Laura is very smart and has a very distinct personality. I don’t think she’s on the autism spectrum or anything like that (although maybe she is, but that’s not important and I don’t care); she’s just almost uselessly intelligent and very uniquely herself. Probably the closest analogy would be Sherlock Holmes, which I guess would make me Watson. Over the years, the two of us have spent a lot of time walking around various cities and solving mysteries, with our favorite mystery being: How much alcohol can a human being consume in one night?
Between being extremely smart and charmingly earnest, Laura was accepted into a fancy Ivy League school, where she declared her major as Egyptology during her first semester. Shortly thereafter, she was harassed by a graduate teaching assistant. I’m not sure what the details are, but the experience was so traumatic that she decided she was absolutely 100% done with that school and its bullshit. She moved out at the end of the academic year and transferred to a smaller liberal arts college with a warmer and infinitely less rapey environment.
In between one school and the next, Laura spent a gap year living with her mom and generally chilling out, reading, studying on her own, writing, making art, and so on. She also worked at Starbucks, I think just to have something to do during the day.
Most people who have any sort of experience with the restaurant service industry can probably get behind this, so I probably don’t need to explain where this is coming from, but at this particular Starbucks the employees amused themselves by making what they called “Crappacinos,” which were exactly what they sound like: mixed coffee drinks that are technically edible, but only technically. A Crappacino would look like a regular drink, but it would be 50% cherry syrup or contain an entire solid brick of nutmeg flavoring, things like that.
The ultimate purpose of Crappacinos to waste the store’s stock and piss off the manager, but the thrill of the game was to try to see if they could convince someone to drink one. The barista would make the drink and leave it sitting until they saw someone walk in who looked like a wealthy douchebag, and the person working the till would offer the drink for free, claiming that it was a new and experimental flavor.
In order for this story to make sense, there are two things you have to understand. First, this was before smartphones, so it’s not like anyone could report the store’s hourly-wage staff and their Crappacinos by leaving a bad review on Yelp. Second, this particular Starbucks was located in a posh suburb of New York that was home to a lot of famous people, including the Clintons.
And one day, who should walk into the store but Bill Clinton. At the time, Laura had been performing experiments to see how much sugar she could dissolve in coffee before it started to take on texture and become mud. She had finally achieved the perfect ratio, which involved enough sugar to make a person very, very sick. She saw her chance and she took it, offering this Crappacino to Bill Clinton herself. He did the only thing he presumably could do when confronted with a bright-eyed and smiling teenager offering him a free drink – he accepted it.
Unfortunately, his Secret Service detail picked up on the fact that the Crappacino had been prepared before they entered, and one of them picked it up and passed it to someone else before it ever got to Bill Clinton… but it got very close to Bill Clinton.
And that’s how my friend Laura almost poisoned the president while taking a gap year in college.
Laura is very smart and has a very distinct personality. I don’t think she’s on the autism spectrum or anything like that (although maybe she is, but that’s not important and I don’t care); she’s just almost uselessly intelligent and very uniquely herself. Probably the closest analogy would be Sherlock Holmes, which I guess would make me Watson. Over the years, the two of us have spent a lot of time walking around various cities and solving mysteries, with our favorite mystery being: How much alcohol can a human being consume in one night?
Between being extremely smart and charmingly earnest, Laura was accepted into a fancy Ivy League school, where she declared her major as Egyptology during her first semester. Shortly thereafter, she was harassed by a graduate teaching assistant. I’m not sure what the details are, but the experience was so traumatic that she decided she was absolutely 100% done with that school and its bullshit. She moved out at the end of the academic year and transferred to a smaller liberal arts college with a warmer and infinitely less rapey environment.
In between one school and the next, Laura spent a gap year living with her mom and generally chilling out, reading, studying on her own, writing, making art, and so on. She also worked at Starbucks, I think just to have something to do during the day.
Most people who have any sort of experience with the restaurant service industry can probably get behind this, so I probably don’t need to explain where this is coming from, but at this particular Starbucks the employees amused themselves by making what they called “Crappacinos,” which were exactly what they sound like: mixed coffee drinks that are technically edible, but only technically. A Crappacino would look like a regular drink, but it would be 50% cherry syrup or contain an entire solid brick of nutmeg flavoring, things like that.
The ultimate purpose of Crappacinos to waste the store’s stock and piss off the manager, but the thrill of the game was to try to see if they could convince someone to drink one. The barista would make the drink and leave it sitting until they saw someone walk in who looked like a wealthy douchebag, and the person working the till would offer the drink for free, claiming that it was a new and experimental flavor.
In order for this story to make sense, there are two things you have to understand. First, this was before smartphones, so it’s not like anyone could report the store’s hourly-wage staff and their Crappacinos by leaving a bad review on Yelp. Second, this particular Starbucks was located in a posh suburb of New York that was home to a lot of famous people, including the Clintons.
And one day, who should walk into the store but Bill Clinton. At the time, Laura had been performing experiments to see how much sugar she could dissolve in coffee before it started to take on texture and become mud. She had finally achieved the perfect ratio, which involved enough sugar to make a person very, very sick. She saw her chance and she took it, offering this Crappacino to Bill Clinton herself. He did the only thing he presumably could do when confronted with a bright-eyed and smiling teenager offering him a free drink – he accepted it.
Unfortunately, his Secret Service detail picked up on the fact that the Crappacino had been prepared before they entered, and one of them picked it up and passed it to someone else before it ever got to Bill Clinton… but it got very close to Bill Clinton.
And that’s how my friend Laura almost poisoned the president while taking a gap year in college.