I'll be the one to speak up for gas station coffee. It's cheap, it gets the job done. In fact, I think the cheapness is a virtue. You can go to Starbucks or some bespoke roadside coffee shack and pay four dollars for a small cup of joe, but that's not going to taste any better than a buck-fifty cup of gas station expresso. Why splurge?
Whenever I stop for gas in a new town, I make a point to buy a cup of coffee along with a full tank of gas. No reason for it, except that I like to be juiced up on a long drive, and I like to see how much effort the station puts into their coffee. Kind of strange to say about coffee that gets brewed in the morning and left out all day, but it takes a little bit of effort to do it right. That effort is a measure of the hospitality of the staff. I've had some good coffee from a gas station, and I've had some really bad coffee that tasted like it had been left in the pot for a week. Also, buying coffee when I tank up is an excuse to walk into the store and get some facetime with the employees. I prefer that to zipping my card into a gas pump and never talking to anyone.
At home, I just use a cheapo drip machine and small cans of Folgers. Nothing fancy. If you want fancy, go talk to my brother, he's the one who grinds his beans and messes around with a french press. Me? I don't have time for that. When I roll out of bed, I've got half an hour to eat, pack a lunch, brew a pot and go. There isn't enough room in that schedule for cream, even if I liked cream in my coffee.
I haven't rambled enough, so lets circle back to how I like to be juiced up on a long drive. Or, rather, why. I've never worked closer than twenty-five minutes from home, and I used to work some pretty odd hours. Because of my own sloppy habits, I never got enough sleep... so I started falling asleep. Never for long, I'd just pass out and wake up in the lunchroom, or in back of the plant, or on the drive home. Sometimes I'd pull into my driveway, put the car in park, turn off the engine, and pass out for fifteen minutes. Needless to say, this is not a safe state of affairs. I didn't like coffee, but coffee was all I had, so I mixed the coffee at work fifty-fifty with cream and sugar and drank it on the way home. As time went on, I needed less and less sugar, though switching over to black had to wait until I got a job at a place where they knew how to clean the damn coffee machine.
But yeah. There's something about a long car ride after work to soothe the soul. It's almost like watching the sunrise after working the graveyard shift. You just feel all the stress and the soreness melt away, and coffee goes with that feeling like butter on biscuits.
