Surprise and Delight

For sixteen visits in a row I have gotten free coffee

at my local Starbucks and I feel a bit guilty about it.

There's no real trick to it.  They have a program, instituted by the wonderful people in my Pacific Northwest homeland, known as Surprise and Delight.  It's really a quite brilliant customer loyalty scheme.  Baristas are expected to give away a certain number of free drinks every shift, whereby they "surprise and delight" the customer.  The theory is that the customer thinks that this is truly awesome and returns to the store to order again.  The cynical among you might view this as a bit insidious.  Starbucks presses your happy button by handing out a free drink to you that costs them virtually nothing.  You are surprised and delighted and do exactly what I'm doing now, telling the story of how you got some free coffee and how its so awesome that Starbucks is rewarding its customers.  There are some people out there that would say that Starbucks is manipulating you, making you feel special and happy about something that is literally required of their employees to do.  They have a quota.  I sort of lump these naysayers in with Flat Earthers, Moon Landing Hoaxers and Anti-Vaxers.  At the end of the day you walk away with a free coffee that you were ready to pay for in the first place and still have the comforting weight of a $5 bill in your pocket.

Here's the deal though...I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to benefit from the surprise and delight nearly every time you get a coffee.  I would have to estimate that since I became aware of this program I have probably been given upwards of 50 free coffees.  After the first few I felt like I was getting away with something.  After a few more I insisted on paying.  Finally one of the girls at the store that I frequent spilled about the program.  So yeah, I wasn't somehow unconsciously using Force powers on these young ladies and wouldn't be turned to the Dark Side by a handful of gratis vanilla lattes.  But I still wondered, why me?

The other day the answer came to me out of the blue.  I was telling a new friend of mine how the girls at the Starbucks keep giving me free coffees.  Flippantly I replied that they love me, I charm their socks off with stupid detective stories.

But then I thought about it...

My mentor for much of my professional life was Windsor Lincoln Olson, World Famous Private Eye. Windsor was an aluminum siding salesman who, in 1958, decided that the life of a gumshoe was far more interesting than exterior residential cladding.

I wrapped my first case as a licensed private detective when I was 23 years old. At the start of the

Windsor Lincoln Olson

World Famous Private Eye

Seattle Times 1983

case Windsor gave me a crash course in film photography after handing me a battered Minolta 35mm camera.  "If anyone asks why you've got a camera," he said, "Just tell 'em you're out birdwatching."  That this was possibly the worst thing to tell people didn't escape me, but this was, after all, a World Famous Private Eye and, in what would become a long string of dubious decisions on my part involving Windsor, I nodded eagerly, "Birdwatching. Got it!"

We sat down in the office, a daylight basement on Queen Anne Alley, facing the parking lot of the Sonics headquarters, and began putting together the final report for our client.  I had shot perhaps 150 photos of a mid-life crisis attorney with a comb-over who had been engaged in vigor

ous double-billing with his paralegal, often in the backseat of a Chrysler LeBaron convertible.

"What you've got to do," Windsor said, "is pick the photos and lay them out so
they tell a story..."  I didn't know it then, even though I had just graduated with a degree in journalism, but this was the most valuable thing that Windsor ever taught me.

Looking back on his life I've come to realize that Windsor was a born storyteller.  It may not be the only thing that makes for a great detective but I'm convinced that telling a good story elevates good detectives to great detectives.  What Windsor knew and was trying to impart to the 23 year old me was that whether its detective work, journalism or aluminum siding sales, the path to success is lining up your words in just the right way so that you connect with your audience and, right down to their sad, misbegotten souls, they "get it."

Over the years, in this fashion, I saw Windsor wow clients and journalists, tourists and fishermen.  He would talk his way around government officials and gun-toting strip club owners.  We could not go anywhere in Chinatown and not eat for free.  Not everyone loved him, but, to put it in Windsor's words, "By golly, he won't forget me."  And no one did.  At the end of the day Windsor would ride off into the sunset in whatever hazard to the roadways that he was convinced was, "a Skookum deal," (a certain listing woody stationwagon that was later diagnosed with termites comes to mind) and I would think to myself, "What the fuck just happened today?"

Windsor, hot on the trail

Seattle Times 1974

For the next 17 years Windsor was a fixture in my life.  And even though I lived life right next to him, was a part some ongoing half-baked scheme, Windsor was always a larger-than-life character to me.  Over the years I collected stories, from his old friends, colleagues, his wife and his kids.  Often the stories that Windsor wouldn't tell himself.  That the man became my hero was a foregone conclusion.  But it was not because of his crazy antics or his schemes that would go wildly pear-shaped.  It was because Windsor was one of the few people who taught me how a life should be lived. Large and weird, sometimes poorly thought out, fearless yet with humility and with the endless capacity to laugh at yourself.

Windsor has been gone a while now and I've forged on the best I knew how for the past 11 years without him.  I like to think that he lives on in the life lessons that he taught me, both sage and dubious.  I'm no Windsor Lincoln Olson.  I'm no World Famous Private Eye.

But as I stood there, day after day at the coffee window, living as large and weird and fearless as I know how, telling tales of my career and my travels, it came to me that I was maybe reaching these girls behind the counter. That maybe I'm no ones idea of Windsor, but maybe I've come to a point in life where I'm somebody's Steve.  That in some small way I'm imparting to them my own haphazard Surprise and Delight.  That in some way that this is the how the cogs of the universe turn and how good shit is maybe recycled back into the world.  And in return I gets a coffee.  Pavlov would be proud.

Thank you Windsor, for the words, the wisdom and the mayhem.  And thanks for essentially setting me up for free coffee for life.

I still tell people that I'm out birdwatching.