Let the record show: this woman single-handedly, and without my permission, devalued every coffee shop that has ever existed or will ever exist. They’re all just buildings now. Buildings with machines in them. They had one job, collectively, and she took it from all of them at once, on a Tuesday, without even trying.

A Tuesday. The most legally unremarkable day on the calendar, a day designed by committee to produce nothing, and somehow it produced this. Blonde. Writing my name on a cup like the alphabet owed her generational wealth. Four seconds later I’d rearranged my entire week around a beverage I could’ve made at home for the price of a coin I’d find in a couch. Spectacular decision-making. Truly the pinnacle of human cognition.

I love coffee. Actually love it. Which robs me of the one dignified excuse available, “oh, it was just the caffeine talking.” It wasn’t. It was the caffeine and a full-blown identity crisis, served together, no extra charge, because apparently that’s a package deal now.

Here’s the part that really should’ve killed the whole operation before it started: I didn’t even have my eye gaze device yet. No backup. No interface. Nothing standing between me and whatever sound my body decided to produce in the moment. So the great seduction strategy, if you could call it that, was me making a series of noises in the general direction of a woman I was deeply committed to impressing, and just trusting the universe to translate. It did not translate. I am fairly sure she just filed it under “enthusiastic regular” and moved on, which, honestly, is a kinder outcome than I deserved.

First time she wrote “Josef” instead of Joseph, I didn’t correct her, mostly because correcting her would’ve required a device I didn’t have yet, so really, Josef was just the default setting. It got worse from there. Stranger spellings. Eventually a shape. Not a letter. A shape, like she’d given up on language entirely and started doing cave art, which, to be fair, was roughly the same communication tier I was operating on.

And every single time she looked up from that machine, my brain, with zero input from me, decided we were mid-season Baywatch, her sprinting in cinematic slow motion across what was, in sworn fact, a Coles car park, before launching herself onto my wheelchair like it was purpose-built lifeguard equipment waiting its whole life for this one scene. Meanwhile the actual room contained a card reader beeping at me and a man making noises at a barista, with the energy of someone who’d rather be literally anywhere else. Reality did not get the memo. Reality never does.

The chair never came up, by the way, and not because anyone was being careful about it. It simply wasn’t relevant, which I know disappoints people hunting for a Very Special Episode. There wasn’t one. There was just me, buying the same drink on a loop, communicating entirely in vibes and volume, quietly building a legal case against a crime that was never, under any circumstances, going to occur, because committing it would’ve required a sentence, and I didn’t have the hardware for a sentence yet.

Nothing happened. No confession, no music cue, no scene. Just a cup, a name drifting steadily further from the one on my birth certificate, a coffee shop that briefly overestimated its own importance by thinking it was a film set, and one very patient barista who somehow never once looked alarmed by the noises.

Would do it all again tomorrow. Not because anything was learned, nothing was, but because the coffee was good and the delusion was free, and I was, for a few minutes at a time, adored by a woman who knew me exclusively as “the guy who tips well, answers to several names, and communicates like a very committed seal.”