If everyone could look after their Starbucks as I look after mine…

… so I’m sitting at Starbucks long enough that I’m beginning to feel the numbness in my left butt cheek. I think to myself, “Guess I’d better shift to the other butt cheek again.”

But then, a strange thing happens that makes all thoughts of preservation of my posterior blood flow seem almost trivial…. It started when a skinny, heroin addict-looking blonde in a white dress sitting in front of me left around a half hour ago. The front door opens and she walks back in – I just happened to be looking towards the door in my effort to appear to be shifting from boredom and not from bodily discomfort, so I noticed.

But now she’s carefully, almost deliberately, wrapping a shawl around her shoulders – a shawl she didn’t have on before. She heads into the bathroom and I, having satisfied my curiosity – and wondering whether butt-sores result from aerodynamically, rather than ergonomically, designed chairs – I lost interest.

A couple of minutes go by and I see her walking away from Starbucks. She’s carrying, wrapped in a shawl, something that looks suspiciously like a picture frame. Busybody that I am, and not aloof to the simple pleasures of the classic girlfight, I picked a worthy opponent behind the counter and explained what I had just seen.

She said, “picture frame?”… and smiled… and went back to mixing some grande skim no-whip outrage in chai or mocha.

I high-stepped it back to my table because the kid with the “I’m a Linux” look started to get dangerously close, and I now realized that this Starbucks was no place to leave your belongings unattended.

I, Nick Oliva… I’ve heeded the call of New York’s Finest: I saw something and I said something.

But nobody listened.

Sure, my butt is rested now and I can probably still waive the girl away a couple more times when she tries to take the empty cup that legitimizes my presence in this tiny corner of this once-great coffee shop where I used to feel safe, but have I made the world a better place?