Beyond Belief

In fiction there is a concept called “suspension of disbelief” which is what enables us to read about (or watch) stories that we know are not and could never be true and still enjoy them, such as stories about magic, alien cultures in far-away galaxies, politicians who aren’t greedy and self-serving, and so on. Just how far one can push this concept depends on the nature of the audience, the nature of the story, and how well it is told; beyond certain limits anyone hearing it will be unable to suspend their disbelief and start objecting to aspects of the tale – at which point the storyteller has lost, and should probably start over (or try something else). This failure has traditionally be called “failure of suspension of disbelief,” although in more contemporary jargon it is sometimes called “rupture” or “jumping the shark.” As a storyteller, I’m always reluctant to do this, since I rely on people’s ability to suspend disbelief for a whole range of things that I do – but I still had to call shenanigans on the story of a woman who claims to have been sent into a diabetic crisis when a Dunkin Doughnuts put sugar in her coffee instead of sugar-free sweetener…

First off, there’s the issue that most Dunkin locations (certainly all of the ones I’ve ever visited) don’t put sweetener in coffee – they hand you the coffee and the sweetener and let you do it yourself. I suspect this is precisely to avoid the kind of problem I wrote about Tim Horton’s having last year, where they had to permanently ban a “customer” from all of their store locations after he repeatedly complained about their coffee and demanded multiple free cups. If they hand you the condiments and you put too much of something in your cup, the company can quite reasonably say that it was your mistake and the resulting product is not their problem. But even if there is a Dunkin location somewhere that does put the sweetener in for your, we have the additional questions of why the customer couldn’t tell that there was real sugar and not artificial sweetener in the cup by taste, why she didn’t watch to see what was put in, and (most important of all) why she would trust her life to a minimum-wage counterperson if her sensitivity to glucose was so severe that she could theoretically die from a misunderstood drink order…

For the record, there are people in the world who have a severe enough case of diabetes that a few extra spoonfuls of sugar would kill them – but that level of sensitivity is rare, and it takes years (and sometimes decades) to reach that point. If your condition is such that a casual mistake could be fatal you would already know that, and would already have taken a variety of measures to make sure that you don’t accidentally ingest something and expire during a routine business transaction. An individual with such a condition would never take anyone’s word for what was in their cup; those people order their coffee black and carry their own packets of sugar-free sweetener precisely because an otherwise trivial mistake could kill them. By the same token, people whose sensitivity to sugars is severe enough to cause an instant reaction would also be aware of their condition, and would not gulp down anything that might (or might not) contain real sugar in the first place…

You can pick up the original story from the Philly.com site if you want to. If the case actually goes to trial it will be interesting to see what evidence the plaintiff has – if any. If the Dunkin location actually added the sugar for her she will have to prove that she asked for a sugar substitute and didn’t get it (which could be difficult without video or audio recordings); if it didn’t she will have to prove that there was some action taken by the company that kept her from noticing that she was adding real sugar to her own cup. She will also have to explain why anyone who could be killed by a spoonful of sugar would do something as suicidally stupid as letting someone pour sweetener into her cup in the first place. Either way, unless the judge who hears this case is a major shareholder in Tim Horton’s or Krispy Kreme, I’d have to say that the smart money is on the company in this one. I’ll keep you posted…