NO SUBSTITUTE FOR CABLE: The ‘Evil Empire’ Of Campus Coffee

Each Boston University student is going to have to cough up an extra dollar for the Student Union fee next year. This new funding increase for the Union is probably very frustrating to other campus groups who futilely petition for more money, hoping to spend it on worthwhile endeavors. Why does the Student Union need more money? How much could it possibly cost to produce those “BUnited” pins? The Union will probably throw it away on some mundane event and then pat themselves on the back for it. While this waste of money is disheartening to most students, the Student Union can have my dollar. I don’t care. How would I spend my dollar anyway? I could take a one-way ride on the T. Before coming to BU, I could have spent a dollar to get a good cup of coffee, but regardless of the price, it’s impossible to find a decent cup of coffee on our campus.

I’ve been a big fan of caffeine for a long time now. If I hadn’t started to drink coffee during my freshman year of high school, maybe I’d be over six feet tall like my father. During stressful periods, I’ve been known to drink five or six cups in a day. As much as I covet my Friday afternoons at the BU Pub, if I had to choose between drinking alcohol or coffee for the rest of my life, I’d have to choose coffee. It’s simply more socially acceptable to say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t have my cup of coffee this morning” than to say, “I’m sorry, I forgot my flask.” Furthermore, with a coffee buzz, I can do homework, but with a beer buzz, I tend to watch reruns of “Nash Bridges” and fall asleep in my clothes.

Caffeine is such a staple of the college lifestyle that one would think, at the very least, the campus dining halls would provide a good cup of Joe for bleary-eyed students. The dining hall coffee professes to be from “Java City.” Can somebody please tell me where “Java City” is? I’m assuming it’s located in some unsanitary third-world nation, since the coffee that they export tastes like something squatted in it. We can afford lobster, but we can’t afford to get coffee that doesn’t taste like it was filtered through an old rag? Also, these “Java City” blends don’t seem to have any caffeine in them. The water in the Charles River has more caffeine and fewer coffee grounds than the dining hall sludge.

Of course, the Boston University campus has been inundated with branches of the Starbucks chain. Placing an order at Starbucks is like speaking a different language. A different dialect of this language is spoken at Espresso Royale. I asked one of the Starbucks employees for a regular coffee and his response was, “Huh?” The prices are also outrageous. Even if one can afford to spend $17 on a cup of coffee, how can one justify a price like that? On top of all of these factors that contribute toward my contempt for Starbucks, their drinks just simply taste like dirt. C’mon, Buffy, let’s get out of this place. Even Campus Convenience coffee is better than this garbage.

Dunkin’ Donuts is really one of the best places for college students to find delicious coffee at reasonable prices. The downside of this option is one has to schlep off campus to visit this middle-class Massachusetts Mecca. One of the great things about Dunkin’ Donuts coffee is it has enough caffeine in it to induce muscles spasms. Also, if I’ve had my Dunkin’ fix for a few consecutive days and then I miss a dose, my muscles twitch even more than they usually do after consuming a cup of their wonderful coffee.

Green Mountain coffee surpasses that of Dunkin’ Donuts. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to find any place on our two-mile stretch of Commonwealth Avenue that brews it. The cart in the basement of CAS used to be a great place for me to find a good caffeine fix, but they recently switched their loyalties from quaint Vermont to the evil empire of “Java City.” Try not to do us any more favors like that in the future, guys. There’s an ice cream store near the T stop at Boston College that still sells Green Mountain coffee, but if I wanted to spend all of my time at BC, I wouldn’t have tried as hard on the SATs.

The bottom line is a dollar won’t buy anything on the BU campus. So, if the Student Union wants to squeeze an extra buck out of me next year, I don’t necessarily have a problem with that. It costs me at least two dollars to get a good cup of coffee, since doing so involves a ride on the T. However, if the Student Union fee increases by another dollar next year, its members are going to have an angry, twitching mob on their hands. Please hand me my pitchfork, my torch and another cup of coffee.