I would imagine the sun rose just like any other day ... given my near certainty that there has yet to be a day where the sun has not risen - but I digress. On this particular day my life would be changed in a significant way. For the world, it was a day that would begin to reduce the value of morning coffee. This is the day that would bring forth the invention of Diet Coke.Unfortunately, I can’t really be more specific in the whens and whos of this most monumentous event. Because this day, like hundreds of others, is shrouded in a veil of corporate secrecy. Over the course of my research I found many websites of dedicated fans such as www.jonsullivan.com, but for all their D.C. knowledge and resources, they offer no names or dates. Coca-Cola Corporation has built no monuments, given no credit. There seem to be no names at all associated with this most awesome creation, and the faces have been lost to time.
The creator eludes me ... who was this individual, or was it a group? Is there a small plaque dedicated to them in the Coke’s Atlanta headquarters? Did they understand the addictive qualities and the joy it would bring the world? For a product that inspires this kind of loyalty and dedication, how can we have no name to the inventor that brought it to us?
Am I merely a case of highly successful marketing turned bad? Do I suffer from an addiction? The signs are there. A material percentage of my weekly wages are spent in support of my habit. Every desk and workspace seems destined to drown in the sea of empty cans that accumulate behind and underneath. I need a can as soon as I wake up, and with every meal from there. It is as much a characteristic as my height and eye color, the red and silver can clasped in my right hand is just part of who I am.
And then there are the more subtle symptoms of addiction, including skillful avoidance of questions regarding the state of my health and diet, as well as consciously disregarding stories of its carcinogenic nature and the possible long-term damage to my liver.
It is for this reason that I hope that I can be boxed up and shipped back to the beginning of a new age, a time just before the world would come to know sweet cold refreshment without the 150 calories of guilt (only the distant ache of irreparable liver damage). I would find the person or people whose work has given me such happiness, and simply say, “thanks”.
