I like my coffee with cream and sugar. Lots of cream and lots of sugar. To me, coffee tastes best if it resembles heated coffee ice cream.
I am intimidated by people who like their coffee black. They make me feel like less of a man, just because I like my coffee to imitate liquid candy. This probably results from an experience I had while working at Honeywell Information Systems about fifteen years ago. (They have since been bought or have gone out of business - something that seems to happen with disturbing regularity to all of the companies at which I have worked. Moral: keep me happy, or else I'll leave and your company will go out of business. But that's beside the point.)
I was interviewing a young woman for a position in the VLSI Design Automation section. I was very junior at the time; my task was basically to take this woman down to the cafeteria for some coffee and get a feel for what she was like as a person. I do not remember her name, so I need not change it to protect her identity. I will, however, refer to myself as Doofus for the rest of this column to protect my identity.
So as I was saying, Doofus and this woman went down to the cafeteria for a coffee break. I got a large coffee and a gigantic sticky coffee roll, as was my custom. She got just a coffee. As we progressed through the line, I stopped to put cream and sugar in my beverage. She says something like "Oh, I'm from the Midwest - we all drink our coffee black."
Now this doesn't sound too bad, but the way she said it and the look of disgust on her face as Doofus was (in her eyes) adulterating his perfectly good coffee with the (wussies only) cream and sugar is something that Doofus will never forget. Needless to say, we did not offer her a position - although I'm not sure she would have wanted to work with such a she-male as Doofus anyway.
Now, fifteen years later, I have come to accept that I like my coffee the way that I like it, and that's the way it is. I try it black every now and then, but really - coffee is pretty vile tasting on its own. And although strong black coffee may indeed put hair on one's chest, unlike my head, I'm plenty hairy as it is, thank you very much. Now I simply must get back to my needlework - this sweater isn't going to knit itself.
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Good to the last rant.