Sleepy Monk Coffee is a bustling little coffee shop in downtown Cannon Beach where all the stim junkies get their cuppa. They don’t have a drive-through and we were en route to Ocean Park for a heavy day of family reuning, so I sent Mystie inside while I waited with the kids in the rustbucket van. I instructed Mystie to either request the barista to surprise me or take it upon herself to choose the surprise herself at her discretion. (Sort of a surprise within a surprise, if you follow me.) Mystie chose to let the barista do the surprising, and she afterward reported that the latter, when informed that this customer sought assistance in pushing the boundaries of everyday existence, took on an attitude suggestive of an underlying “Are you serious? There are customers waiting in line” sentiment.
While it is true that there were customers waiting in line, this author hardly thinks that justifies the completely mundane mocha which resulted from the experiment.
Scoring Breakdown: Sleepy Monk Coffee
| Score | Comments | |
|---|---|---|
| Audacity |  |
A mocha is essentially the seafood sampler of a coffee shop. What patron of coffee shops *doesn’t* like a mocha? |
| Reaction | |
Expressing even the slightest hint or vague sense of hopeless negativity and fatalism when confronted by a surprise is completely unacceptable. |
| Discovery | |
I’ve had numerous mochas in my lifetime, and I am even wont to order them on occasion when feeling particularly dull. This surprise held nothing new for me whatsoever. |
| Satisfaction |  |
As far as mochas go, this one was completely ordinary in every respect. Definitely not something I would order again from a hippy downtown fair-trade organic coffee shop. (Their coffee beans were actually pretty good, albeit a touch on the pricey side at roughly twice the cost per pound of my usual inorganic beans. We got a bag for free with the vacation rental.) |
Overall score for the Sleepy Monk: -3, a pretty awful surprise. I would advise you to avoid requesting surprises here and just order something that sounds good. On a completely random note, I also just ate a Dove chocolate whose wrapper told me that I “should charge for your great advice”. If the chocolate peddlers think so, then it must be true. I’d best set about establishing a mechanism for doing so here. Consider this piece of advice to be the “first one”, which I am reliably informed is always free.