Stirring tale
On a sleepy Monday morning, a bunch of software engineers tired after a morning's work of checking email forwards, catching up on the world news and cricket scores, decided to take a break and thus found themselves in the pantry milling around the multi fauceted vending machine - the dispenser of all things useful and necessary for the preparation of a hot beverage. It can dispense milk, hot water (sometimes one has to put one's gustatory organ to the test to distinguish between the two) and politically incorrect and seemingly racist, black coffee.
After filling one's cup with the liquids of one's choice and after having added requisite powders for flavouring and measured amounts of sugar for sweetening, one can imagine the shock as one discovered that the stirrer - the wonderful invention that can fuse together disparate ingredients into a wholesome cup of joy, the instrument responsible for creating many a storm in a tea cup, the catalyst of an invisible molecular miracle that stuffs solids into the empty spaces within a fluid - was not in its usual resting place of a tumbler half filled with water. As an aside one might also add that it's quite fortunate that the tumbler cannot live up to its name on this own, unless one puts it down with say a swipe of the hand. Now it's not uncommon an occurrence to find the stirrer missing from its resting place; since quite like a migrant worker, the stirrer works away from its watery abode in a cup in a far away hand.
Thus one proceeded to take a look around the room to find the hand that had the stirrer, and the horror, the horror - the stirrer was not to be found in any cup in the room. Then one looked down and found in dustbin, among used tea bags and other things that had reached the end of their usefulness the stirrer. Having never before faced such a predicament in one's coffee making lifetime, one proceeded to face the bitter truth and had one's coffee shaken, not stirred. Coming to think of it, the truth was bitter because one had the coffee shaken, not stirred.
Epilogue:
The stirrer was not rescued from its graveyard and thus was destined never again to work its magic in a cup again. In its place stands a poor replacement - a spoon. Even though it is adequate for the job, stirring isn't what it was made for. Sigh!
