I just wanted a cup of tea, damn it

When my friend Kathy was in Louisiana recently, she could not get a decent cup of tea. When she asked for hot water, she received a styrofoam cup of boiling water. In my part of Louisiana, as Kathy knows, there is an authentic English tea room, run by Brits. However, my office is nowhere near the lovely tea room. There is another tea room in the next town, but it is inconveniently located, and besides, the management had a right-wing speaker at one of its salons, so I do not go there anymore.

So today, I tried to go to a Starbucks near my office, but it was closed because of some type of sidewalk construction. So I went to a local coffee place that serves good food and coffee, and asked what type of black tea they had. "We don't have any black tea," the young woman at the counter said. "But you must," I told her. "Do we have any black tea?" she asked someone else, who shook her head "no."

"The teas are over there," the counter clerk said, so I "over there" and immediately found black tea. Mind you, there was only one variety, what with all of the flavored teas and all of the tisanes, which are mistakenly called teas. I brought it to her, and she looked at it as though I might have brought her a dead mouse. She then gave me--you know what's coming--a cup with hot water in it.

You do not put a tea bag in a cup of hot water; you pour hot water over a bag or over loose tea. Why, oh why, in a country that is obsessed with gourmet coffee, can't people be trained to provide even the most rudimentary service in presenting tea?

Getting this type of service made me think of my other huge peeve--having grocery store checkers ask me "What's this?" after every other product is delivered on the belt. We used to have two Albertson's stores in our community, and no one there ever asked me what the products were. But now I am once again stuck with untrained help whose cooking and shopping experience is apparently very limited. I have to pay close attention and be on the ready to say "leeks," "Japanese eggplant," "Romaine lettuce," "kale."

I just wanted a cup of tea, damn it.