The Coffee Spill
A spilled coffee, a missed note, and a forgotten carton of milk set off a chain of events
I spilled a little coffee on my desk. Just a few drops. No big deal. I reached for a napkin.
The napkin dispenser was empty, so I used a sticky note. This made the note unreadable. The note was my reminder to buy milk.
Without milk, my roommate couldn’t make her tea. She switched to black coffee. The caffeine hit too hard, so she took a longer walk to burn it off.
On that walk, she bumped into an old friend having coffee with his manager. She charmed the manager so completely that he offered her a job on the spot, displacing a man who had been with the company for twenty years.
The man, now unemployed, decided to finally pursue his dream of raising alpacas. The alpacas thrived, and within two years he was exporting luxury wool across the Atlantic.
One of those sweaters ended up on the back of a tourist in Rome. A pickpocket tried to steal her wallet but was distracted by the unusual texture of the fabric. The thief missed his mark and was caught by the police.
In custody, he ratted out his entire network of thieves, accidentally unraveling the largest pickpocketing ring in Europe.
Interpol, impressed, gave the credit to the local station, which earned international prestige. A delegation from the UN was sent to investigate.
The delegation’s visit caused a traffic jam in the city center. A wedding limousine was caught in it. The bride and groom, trapped for hours, began questioning their compatibility. The wedding was called off.
One of the bridesmaids, freed from the obligation of catching the bouquet, went home early and opened a dating app she hadn’t touched in months. She matched with a man dabbling in computer models. Her constant complaints about traffic and transit gave him the focus he needed to create an algorithm that would later revolutionize urban planning.
His designs reshaped entire cities: new roads, new bus routes, new zoning. Freight shifted, supply chains bent, and warehouses overflowed.
A single dairy distributor, suddenly rerouted, found itself drowning in surplus cartons. They launched a global clearance sale.
This morning, the deliveryman dropped a box on my doorstep. Inside: twelve cartons of milk.
And so, because of that spilled coffee, I got more milk than I will ever need.
But my desk? Still sticky.