That dumb thing I did: episode two

The hand picture will make sense in a minute. Hang tight.

I spend the majority of most days of my life drinking coffee. Breaks are taken here and there for working, eating, hygiene, parenting, etc., but 90% of the day you will find me with a coffee cup in my hand. I am a frequent flier at all of the local drive through coffee shops and I particularly like hitting up Caribou after a leisurely stroll around the Marshalls down the street.

I’m not sure if it’s true for all Caribou locations, but the one I go to has a daily quiz and if you get the question correct, you get a statistically insignificant 10 cents off of your coffee! The questions are usually ridiculously obscure so I try to google the answer before the barista comes to take my money. I am generally unsuccessful, so you can imagine my delight when I pulled up and saw this question a couple of weeks ago:

“What are the bones of the fingers called?”

Boom! Don’t have to google this one, bi$@&es! For the record, I got 98.7% on my musculoskeletal anatomy exam in medical school. How an anatomy exam works is there are little toothpick markers poked into certain anatomical locations on the cadavers and you have to identify the structure. I only missed one question. I answered “obturator canal” when the answer was “obturator foramen.” Which is like, totally splitting hairs, but whatevs. I was honestly so pumped that I didn’t fail the exam I didn’t even care about that last 1.3%. I emailed my professor, Dr. Enders, and asked him for a copy of my exam so I could put it on my refrigerator. He agreed that was refrigerator-worthy and sent me a copy. That was probably 13 years ago and I still have the test. I like to keep track of my wins in life.

So back to Caribou. Anatomy is my JAM! My entire life has been preparing me for THIS MOMENT in the drive through of THIS COFFEE SHOP and a chance to save 10 CENTS on my 4 dollar latte! I was ready to blow the barista’s mind with my wealth of knowledge and dominate the drive through. My stethoscope was strewn across the passenger seat and she was about to RECOGNIZE just who she was dealing with. With my answer to the question, I was going to inspire her to be a doctor someday too! She would feel empowered to rise up from her tiny coffee shop, go to medical school and heal all of the people! My heart was racing and my arm hair was standing on end. In the rush of adrenaline, I sputtered out the term “METACARPALS!” The look of awe I was expecting to see on the teenage barista’s face was somehow replaced by a look of pity.

“Oh gosh, I’m sorry, the right answer is phalanges.”

My ego, flying so high I could barely see it, was now being torpedoed out of the sky at the hands of a teenage barista. As my ego was in freefall, I reached over, covered my stethoscope like we cover dead bodies, took my coffee and drove off. My head hung low and my soul was as mutilated as my cadaver at the end of the semester.

But hey, aren’t my nails cute in that first picture???