the quality of styrofoam is not strained
and it isn't free either

January 29, 2002

Today's Reading
Sleeping with Cats by Marge Piercy

This Year's Reading
2002 Book List

I drank coffee out of a styrofoam cup this morning. Millions of people do that every day, but not me. Not usually. So that got me thinking. I have a thing about styrofoam cups. My father had a thing about styrofoam cups. He would drive miles out of his way on family vacation trips just to find a place where he could get coffee in a paper cup. He swore they made the coffee taste different. Also, they weren't biodegradable. Maybe they are now, but they weren't then. I acquired his aversion to them. My thing about styrofoam cups intensified shortly after my father died in 1989 and peaked sometime in the early 1990's.

In January of 1991, Cosmodemonic Telecomm sent me to Crosby's Quality College in Florida for two weeks (or was it longer? it seems longer). Since the whole foundation of Philip Crosby's "Quality is Free" thing is the notion of conformance to requirements, the whole experience is pretty regimented. There are requirements for everything. They bus you to lunch and you have exactly one hour to eat. The bus leaves at the required time whether you're on it or not. You don't get to drive your own car or choose your own restaurant. There are scheduled coffee breaks and bathroom breaks (kind of like est for those who remember the '70s).

In the coffee break room there they had styrofoam cups. I hated them. All coffee cups had to have lids. You weren't allowed to have a beverage in a cup without a lid, kind of like the rule I have for the kids in my car nowadays come to think of it. The instructor was very proud of this example of conformance to requirements, especially how much money it saved them. At some point in the history of the Quality College they noticed they were spending a lot of money on cleaning up coffee spills on the carpets. Once they instituted the requirement for covered cups, the money spent cleaning the carpet went way down. Conformance to requirements saves money. Quality is free. You get the idea. They basically brainwash you.

About halfway through my stay there, the Gulf War started. We'd all been checking the news at every break the whole time, expecting the bombing to start at any moment. It still felt weird when it did.

By the time the second course was over, I was more than ready to go home to my car and my own coffee cups and my own choices of where and when to eat lunch. Traveling home was a bit of a hassle. The airports instituted all kinds of new security measures as a precaution. I guess they thought somehow there would be reprisals. It all seems quaintly historical now.

The night I returned the roads around Boston were icy and rutted with frozen slush. My car handled stiffly and felt alien. I wasn't used to driving. I went straight from the airport to Somerville to hear Boiled in Lead with Charla and Mark at at Johnny D's. It felt eerie when they sang Brave Bombardier:

"I am a soldier
I'm a young volunteer
I fly through the air
I'm a brave bombardier,
And I shall rain
On the people down there
Never their faces I'll see."

--Brave Bombardier, Boiled in Lead