When You're Hot, You're Hot

We didn't end up doing our big weekly grocery shopping trip last weekend because Hubby was out of town, and the intricacies of shopping with a little boy and an infant perplex me. How do you get both of them into a cart safely? Do you hustle them across a parking lot? Or park, the car, run to grab a cart, and leave them buckled in the car by themselves for a minute? Does the Boy ride in the big part of the cart, potentially standing and dancing while I meander through the aisles? And then how do you get everything, children included, loaded into and out of the car? All in all, it seemed like a shopping excursion is rife with more safety concerns than I can handle, so we skipped it. I figured we had enough of the staples in the house to tide us over, 'cause I'm always prepared for a nuclear holocaust or some other such disaster.

I figured wrong. Yesterday, we ran out of fat-free half & half and organic sugar. Hmmm...as I look at that sentence, I feel very granola yuppie. Anyhoo, whilst I love the antioxidants in my single cuppa joe, the bitterness can get to me, so I cut it with dairy and sweetness. Go ahead, you purists, judge me. Anyway, I came to the realization at 7:00 a.m. that my regular brew was kind of undrinkable. No problem, I thought, I'll swing through McDonald's to pick up some of their new Premium Roast Coffee since it's on the way to work. And I've gotta say, it isn't bad. But that's not the point of this post.

Take a look at their Premium Roast Coffee cups:

I hope you can see that. It reads, "CAUTION: Handle with Care: I'M HOT."

I have long* believed that our litigiousness is dumbing us down. By this I mean that we try to squeeze cash out of people for not warning us about things that should be obvious, like the fact that fresh coffee is hot. This leads some to believe that if they aren't blatantly warned about something, then it must not be dangerous, and thus they abdicate responsibility for using their own common sense.

Back to McDonald's...we all know that McDonald's lost the hot coffee lawsuit. In a total CYA move, they put warnings on their coffee cups to let the Gentle Coffee Drinkers of the world know that the coffee is not cold, not tepid, but HOT. These warnings have been there since the mid-1990's, so what's my problem?

It's this: why did they anthropomorphizing the cup with "I'm?" Could it be that they saw a loophole in the old, "CAUTION: Coffee is Hot" warning? Like someone could make the argument that they thought they were being warned that coffee is hot in general, but that they didn't think the warning applied to the contents of that particular cup? Sheesh, I hope not.

We're not even going to get into the painful, how are we doin? thing on the side. I have half a mind to call the 800 number printed alongside this question and say, "We'd be doing much better if you remembered the 'g' at the end of doing. Or at least included an ' to show that you know you've contracted the word."

Uh-oh. Maybe I should've gone for the fully caffeinated brew. Clearly decaf has made me cranky.

*Long = ten years.