Starbucks Drama: Old gals grab an apple fritter at Starbucks

It must be some law that if you hang around a Starbucks long enough, some old people will come in and act like fools. I had 45 minutes to kill Monday morning, so I got a mocha, flipped the lid on my laptop and waited. Cue the muy estupido.

WOACAS approacheth - these were the bane of my existence when I worked in retail. (Hover your mouse over the word for a tooltip.) Two of them. They only travel in packs you know, so that the joys of crankiness that come from old age is doubled with this group.

Number One (too bad she didn't have pointed ears and bleed green) had a princess complex. How do I know? She was too good to do anything herself.

She had a splint on her finger and used this as an excuse to wince a lot in a dramatic, sighing manner and then glance about to see if anyone had seen her. She also had a tendency to order #2 about - something #2 apparently had no problem with.

Number One orders for them - she's the alpha female, you know, and proceeds to find a table recently vacated by a busy morning mommy and her tooting, toothless, toddling toddler.

What to tooting, toothless, toddling toddlers leave? CRUMBS!

The crumbs proved to be a source of major consternation. You would think that Archduke Franz Ferdinand had just been shot from the furor these flakes created.

First, Number One puts her hands on her hips and "tsks" loudly, as of that is going to be enough to get the baristas to stop what they're doing - i.e. serving the 15-person line that was quite literally backed up to the door and causing people to enter, turn around and walk out - and come clean the table for her.

Seeing as how the passive-aggressive play wasn't going to work out, she tries to brush the crumbs off the chairs with the hand with the splint on it. This, predictably, ends badly. More wincing. More dramatic sighs. I watch in excited glee, although I cannot determine if her culottes are muddy green with a subtle hint of yellow, the victim of a tragic washing machine accident or just ugly.

Number One puts puts a quilted yellow satchel - which I later determined contained two Harlequin romances, a New York Times, a New York Post and a plastic Ziploc bag containing various medications - in a chair and went over to the condiment bar to retrieve napkins.

Before applying the napkins to the chair bottom, she looks around for #2, as if to say "Why am I doing all the work here?" Indeed. #2 is oblivious, wedged into a crush at the handoff bar between banana girl and a mother ordering chocolate frappuccinos for her daycare-bound daughters.

Napkins are smeared across the chairs and across the table top in a vain effort to eradicate the crumbs and flakes of the pastry glory days. The floor is the recipient of this largesse. Mice would grow fat on such a surfeit of bounty; the cockroaches sure as hell do.

Satisfied with the state of cleanliness (and possibly godliness) of the mesa, Number One sits and begins to unpack the quilted carryall. The detritus of the morning is spread across the table.

#2 arrives with coffee and then with pastry - an old-fashioned donut and an apple fritter. She offers to fix Number One's coffee and gets specific instructions on cream and sugar. Number One starts to carve up the pastries with all the precision of a drill sergeant and glee of a third-grader.

They begin to eat. Crumbs fly. They don't just fly, they take wing.

The pastries half-devoured and the coffee half-drunk, they decide to read. The Post for Number One, the Times for #2. Then they switch. They continue to steal bits of pastry from each other's plates, although they each got half a donut and half a fritter. Neither likes the fritter, although they're eating it with fair abandon. But it is clear the donut is gone first.

They turn their attention to the Harlequins for a brief moment before Number One decides it is time to take the morning pills. She sends #2 back to the register with a request for water, which she uses to swallow a number of large capsules removed from individual vials from the plastic bag tucked away in the quilted yellow carryall. I was expecting a pill-keeper. Maybe she likes to keep her pills separate. Easier to sell them to the other old folks that way.

They resume reading and fighting for the last bites of apple fritter. A sharp fork fake settles this in favor of #2 when Number One goes for the Times Arts section.

Suddenly, as if spooked, they start jamming stuff into the quilted yellow carryall. Newspapers, pills, books - everything is crammed willy-nilly back into the sack.

And they're gone. The place looks like a war zone from "Cocoon." Or an assisted living cafeteria.