recalling early d&d days

So, this Sunday, while reading the Globe magazine, I was reminded of my donut-tree-dress wearing days. This article on
adolescent coffee drinking brought me back to the tender age of 14, when I took my first sip of the liquid energy I have come to rely so heavily on today.

I don't remember ever drinking coffee prior to slinging donuts at D&D, but then again, I still don't remember how I managed to wake up in said D&D dress on the morning after my 21st birthday, so that doesn't mean much.

What I do remember is working at the Dunk before they actually had iced coffee machines. In the summer, when demand was high, we would continuously brew pots of coffee and leave them out on the counter, uncovered, until the next day. We stored as many as we could in the mini refrigerator we kept behind the counter, but on Saturdays and Sundays, when the Warwick beach goers sporting their bikini tops and cutoffs streamed in for their large iced coffees with extra cream and 20 sugars, we poured the coffee from the pots on the counter over tall, full cups of ice, and hoped for the best. (As an aside, after multiple customers returned bearing iced coffees with dead flies floating near the top, our location finally invested in machines).

During my young, "health conscious" days, I used to drink my iced-coffee black, loaded with sweet & low. That is, I would drink this if I wasn't sipping a wine cooler provided for me by one of the shop's managers, a 40-something woman and parent to two adolescent girls, with whom I often worked evening shifts and who probably still works there today, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Anyway, I'd drink so much iced coffee, usually on an empty stomach- in those days I didn't eat - and I remember spending shifts calling a friend of mine who was transferred to a D&D about a mile away, and comparing notes as to how many coffees we drank and how "buzzed" we felt. Good times.

No wonder I am so high strung now.

Other things I remember about my d&d days:

- the old guy who every day used to order an extra-small coffee (no longer available now) and then complain that it was the size of a thimble.

- the time I got pissed at a customer, and spread horseradish sauce on his egg and cheese bagel.

- being challenged by a co-worker to take one bite of every treat that D&D offered, then, after meeting such challenge, attempting to drink a combination of mustard and raw eggs to throw it all up.

- crawling into work at 4 a.m. to make the donuts after a heavy night of drinking and mistakenly picking up the fresh-from-the-fryer rack with my bare hands.

-the day we shed the orange, pink and beige donut tree dresses for the more flattering and stylish gray polyester pants and maroon polos.