The iced coffee was $6.25 and the iPad swung toward him with the smoothness of a thing that had been designed. Three buttons: 20, 25, 30. Behind him stood a coworker whose opinion he wanted. Beside him the barista looked politely at the ceiling. He pressed 25 in under two seconds, the way you take your hand off a stove.

In the car he did the arithmetic: $1.56, which is nothing, on top of $6.25, which is also nothing, four days a week, which comes to something. He keeps a spreadsheet at home with a column for this. What the spreadsheet has no column for is the two seconds themselves, and the certainty that the whole shop was deciding what kind of man he was.