Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

You can subscribe to this site via RSS (the humanity!) or .

Plain by Default

I hate to make my first post in awhile be totally random and ridiculous, but I can’t help myself. Apparently an English professor got tossed from Starbucks for refusing to order a bagel without cream cheese. That’s right, when she refused to say “without butter or cheese” she was “forcibly ejected.”

<rant>
This just happens to be a pet peeve of mine as well. Without even going in to how ridiculous the whole Starbucks lexicon is, when ordering coffee or a bagel at any establishment the default should be additive free. That means when you order a coffee it should come without milk or sugar unless you specify and when you order a bagel it should come without cream cheese and untoasted. It really does drive me insane when I take a first sip of coffee and it’s all sweet when I asked for just coffee. I’ve also gotten in to an argument at Starbucks with a “friendly” barrista who insisted that I had to order my coffee not sweet if I wanted it that way. When I told him that was not the case at any other Starbucks I had ever been to, he insisted I was wrong.
</rant>

August 17, 2010