Diet What?

Sometimes in the mornings I stop and get a cup of coffee before heading off to work; it holds me over until I can get a pot started once I get there.

Other days I get my caffeine from a diet cola; depends on my mood and the weather. At the vending machine where I get the soda there’s a button customers can push to add a blast of vanilla or cherry flavoring. It’s a nice touch, and now and then it brings back memories of my misspent youth.

Wa-a-a-ay back in the day, before e-mail, microwaves and cell phones — even back before diet soda was marketed as much as it is today — it was an after-school treat to walk up to a local hangout and get a Coke to drink before catching the school bus home. Sometimes we’d get a cherry Coke. But my favorite was a chocolate Coke. A chocolate Coke is pretty much a Coke with a squirt or two of Hershey’s syrup in it. It tastes better than it sounds. I think they’re pretty darned good.

I suppose in some places it’s possible still to get a chocolate Coke, but I don’t know because I’ve been drinking diet sodas for so long now that regular sodas taste too sweet so I don’t drink Cokes. I know it’s been possible to buy bottled and canned cherry Cokes, lime and vanilla Cokes, even cherry and vanilla Dr Peppers, which also offered a chocolate-cherry Dr Pepper for a limited time a few years back. But Coke and Pepsi have apparently never considered adding chocolate to their offerings. They really should.

If they did I wonder if they’d consider adding chocolate to their diet colas. I’ve seen lime, cherry and lemon in diet sodas, so why not chocolate?

Apparently, some folks can’t comprehend that. There’s a certain national hamburger chain that indicates on its drive-through menu board, that customers can add cherry, lemon, vanilla or chocolate flavorings to their drinks. I won’t give the chain any free advertising, but it uses a black and white checkerboard as part of its décor. So one day while I was ordering lunch at the drive through the thought occurred to me: “chocolate diet Coke. Gotta have one.”

So I ordered one. Silence. Then “Uh, we can’t do that.”

Me: Why not?

Clueless kid at the mic: “We don’t do those.”

Me: Yes you do. It says so right here on the menu board.

Believe it or not, this kid had to ask his manager if he could make a chocolate diet Coke. Apparently the manager reminded him that as a customer, I am right and I got my chocolate diet Coke.

Maybe it was the notion of diet and chocolate that threw the kid off his bearings. Some folks think the two don’t belong together. They’re wrong. Maybe he thought it was against corporate policy to do something original. Or maybe he was just too young to appreciate the adventure of adding chocolate to any kind of Coke. Doesn’t matter. I had totally flummoxed the poor thing.

And it was so much fun I came back a few weeks later and did it again!