CMP Finals - From second last to second, I hope
Yesterday, I stayed up till 0430 to cram for an ‘exam’. The exam consisted of questions about the 17 core coffees sold in M’sia, promotional coffees offered by Starbucks since March 1st and a personal favourite coffee. Not your typical kind of exam but it still requires the use of the sponge I had up there (seriously, I haven’t used it since the Biology 6 paper to memorise a bunch of things at short notice, which is a long time indeed). BTW, the person who told me my pineal gland was malfunctioning, you’re right. I’m blogging at 4am!!!
Prior to stopping work, I was ‘persuaded’ to join this coffee competition. Being the curious person I am, I decided to hop on. There were 2 problems. One, my coffee knowledge was practically zero. I only tried out Sumatra in detail before, with a few other coffees and that’s all! Two, I don’t have a personal favourite coffee. I might have tried going for the new Peaberry Blend, or Sumatra, or even Caffe Verona (it’s stuck in my head, partly because I got one bag of it to enjoy). Instead, I ended up being assigned Kenya instead. Fair enough, because I didn’t choose earlier (in my defense, I didn’t know we had to do so in advance!). BTW, if you’re really interested, I’m including the links to information on Starbucks.com if you want to have a look.
To prepare for it I got some notes made by my supervisor. And I read through the official Coffee and Tea Resource Manual thrice (thankfully, it did the trick). Actually, we also had a small book called the Coffee Passport to aid Starbucks partners to know more about the coffees. It was very useful, especially during times like this. The best part is I completed mine a long time ago(because I was ‘ordered’ to). Everything nicely done, with complete information (copied from www.starbucks.com, because I was lazy to stay back after work to copy from the abovementioned manual). All I had to do is just ’swallow’ everything in the Passport, and everything should be fine. The problem is, my Passport is missing (of all the passports stored in the store!). Stupid huh? So, I had to borrow my supervisor’s Passport too! How inconvenient.
As I’m the greenest person on the team, I had a lot to read up (the rest have been through the whole process before, and I have no idea what I’m up against). But I didn’t mind it one bit. I preferred being the underdog. Never liked being considered top of class thing. I liked the proximity, not ownership (you know, not too dumb but not too smart kinda thing). You know why? If you’re considered too smart, people will assume too much and jump ahead too far. On the other hand if you’re considered too stupid they might just oversimplify it or worse, dispense with it altogether. That’s why the middle ground is best, where you should be given the Goldilocks explanation (not too much, not too little), and information is given to you when you ask for it. To me, the latter is especially important. Why? Memorising facts suck big time. I find it easier, if I can get to understand it in context (historical or geographical, for example). It’s easier (and more fun!) when you can read a story instead of memorising just one chapter. Plus, it ever hurts to be exposed to the information repeatedly (that’s about the only secret of how I manage to keep so many things in my head). Ok, back to the main story.
How I got to sucking up the required bits is just a matter of time, and dedication. I shan’t bore you with the details. So on the 21st, we just went down to the Starbucks at Berjaya Times Square at 8am and waited. I saw a Renault F1 replica there! Yucks! Blue and yellow! While waiting for the thing to start at 10, our District Manager (who was part of the committee) came by and offered us some food. It’s quite awkward actually, but we eventually settled on sandwiches and Americano. The 2 espresso shots, plus the Nescafe I brought at 7-11 managed to work its wonders, and I manage to stay awake for a little while longer.
In truth, I know it’s a competition of some sorts between the districts (I don’t get how Starbucks classify the stores by their version of districts, I don’t get the order out of that chaos). I’m just part of a team of 4 members (SunMed+IOI Mall) and of the 8 teams in the 1st session, we’re second last (based on overall scores). After running through the series of questions (10 questions each, a mix of objective, subjective and True/False questions), we have to do a ‘coffee sharing’ where you basically talk about a coffee. After the questions, we managed to collect 32 out of 40 points. I did either a 9/10 or 10/10, depending on whether the scorer noticed that I made a spelling error with one of the coffee names I gave as an answer. Damm. I was plain lucky, because I got the easy questions, and I managed to discuss a little bit more before my turn came (each person had to answer 5 questions, in a rotating order).
Anyhow, that was good enough to put ourselves far away from the last place (that’s our aim, not to get last) by the time we got to the Coffee Sharing session. That’s good enough because I didn’t have a personal coffee to share (I used everything from the manual, with minimal personalisation). Besides, it was done at lunch time, and I can never think properly when I’m hungry! It’s not too bad actually, because the rest of our team are ‘experts’ at it already, so they can crap their way out.
So, after that the rest of the team went home and I went to Borders. Since I’m already so tired (caffene’s half life is only 6 hrs, that’s why the effects never last long) I left in under an hr and had lunch at McD. Starbucks partners that I had the chance to observe usually eat at two places here. One is at McD, the other at the Food Court at Plaza Low Yat. We don’t go to Ravenholm. Uh, I mean Starbucks. It’s too expensive to eat there. 
After some price hunting at Low Yat, I went to the Starbucks there (I got only juices, because I can’t drink them free at work) for a while to hang out to wait for my mom and sis to finish shopping, then home to sleep till midnight. And then here I am.
As for the final results, it’s still too early to find out. Hope that we did enough to stay afloat. 
