Coffee Crone: Taming Coffee Blog

May 12 2008

Nicole and the Donut Hole

I'm probably not Canadian enough to blog about Tim Horton's. No doubt one has to be born and bred to understand the role this iconic purveyor of bad coffee and fried dough has on the Canadian psyche. But it's Monday, and I'll give it a try, anyway.

Some background...

I tried a cup of Tim Horton's coffee in 2001, shortly after I immigrated. I found it to be insipid and never went back. I didn't make a big fuss about it because I understood that Timmies is a Canadian Institution (in the big "C" big "I" sorta way). I worried that I would appear ungrateful, or worse, too American, if I said anything. And then, after all, when the US has offered up Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts to the world, there really wasn't much I could say.

I simply had my coffee elsewhere (urmmm, that would be at home) until last year when I went back to work doing case management and found that my clients considered a trip with them to Tim's, periodically, to be part of the job. I'd order a small black coffee and pretend to drink it whilst my client had a huge double double and the requisite piece of fried dough. At meetings, people would bring in TimBits (aka donut holes), and if I needed a little sugar shock to get through the event, I'd indulge.

I never really did get why millions of Canadians would stand in line daily (sometimes numerous times each day) to order something inedible and then wash it down with something impotable, but culture is like that.

Despite all of this, I really did understand the national outrage when three thugs posing as Tim Horton junior managers fired a worker because she gave a free TimBit to a child. The story was movingly told in every newspaper in the country. I could picture the young child, snot coursing down her cheek, as she accompanied her mother in search of her third Timmie fix of the day. I could imagine the smiles of those in line as the worker held out the bit of dough. Heck, I could even see the pimples on the faces of the managers who whisked her in the back and insisted she sign an admission of guilt before they fired her from her $9.05 an hour job.

Her reinstatement was also foreseeable, as was the public apology—behold the power of the press.

The part that surprised me was how ungrateful, how unCanadian, this single mother of four would be now that she had her job back. Imagine that. Nicole says her career with Tim Horton's is over and that she will have to look for another job because "no one will like me."

Rumour has it that a smoothie shop has already offered her a new job.